XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language)

XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) is a language for electronic communication of business and financial data. Again it is one more family of XML and hence it is open source. Typically, in most of the finance reports we treat report as a block on text. What XBRL does is that it gives unique tag/key to each individual data item. What it means is that data item like net profit may have a unique tag in XBRL. Since it is computer readable, computers can read XBRL document, analyze it, parse it and also exchange it with other applications. It increases the comfort factor or ease with which applications can handle financial or business data now.

This introduces one more product line for product based companies. One can write tools/products to transform business data to XBRL format. ;)

Should you want more information on XBRL or XBRL specification, you can visit following URL:
http://www.xbrl.org/SpecRecommendations/

While you are on that site, please do not forget to visit the sample XBRL to resolve all your doubts.
http://www.xbrl.org/Example1/

Cheers,
Amol