Research agreement reached on XBRL

The plot around the adoption of extensible Business Reporting Language is continuing to thicken.
There’s now a three-year agreement (announced today) in place for carrying out “cooperative XBRL taxonomy research” between two key players: XBRL US Labs, the research and development arm of XBRL US, and the Financial Accounting Foundation, the parent organization of the Financial Accounting Standards Board.
XBRL has been around as a data standard for a decade and investment managers and analysts are using it for research and it is starting to have an impact on the exchange and analysis of business data in financial statements and reports. In fact XBRL US and the FASB have worked together since 2006 to apply XBRL to US GAAP accounting standards for companies to digitally “tag” complex financial statements and footnotes using a common language.
For those in need of some over-simplified context: Hypertext markup language, or HTML, is the language used to build most static web pages. It can define the order, font, color and other aspects of how text or other elements are displayed on a web page. XML is a language used to define specific pieces of data. XBRL tags are used for even finer precision, providing standards-based, agreed-upon definitions for specific pieces of business data, such as cash flow or revenue.
If accountants end up adopting XBRL will advisers be soon to follow?