The XBRL Book: Simple, Precise, Technical

This is the seventh edition (2025), augmented with updates such as XBRL Formula and various fixes and rewrites. This book provides an introduction to the basics of XBRL targeting specifically technical people: developers, software engineers, data scientists. It leaves business considerations or concrete applications aside, since they are covered extensively in other books. While it includes coverage of the syntaxes of XBRL (including XML, JSON, CSV, and XHTML), most of the book is focused on the cubic data model specific to XBRL, in a way compatible with the Open Information Model. It does not require any knowledge of XML, as the sections on XML syntax can conveniently be skipped without understanding XBRL any less.This provides a higher level of abstraction that makes it easier to learn XBRL without having to deal with the complexities and intricacies of XML technologies. This makes the book accessible to people with other backgrounds than IT, such as accountants, if they enjoy diving into the technical side. This seventh edition covers - instances - facts - taxonomies and DTS - schemas and linkbases - concepts, abstracts, hypercubes, dimensions, domains, members, line-items - label linkbases - presentation networks - calculation networks - reference linkbases - footnotes - definition networks and hypercube validation - table linkbases, slicing and dicing - formula linkbases - open taxonomies and presentation-based (EDGAR- and ESEF-like) filings - the data point model, closed taxonomies, and DPM-based (COREP/FINREP-like) filings - some patterns commonly used in practice (EDGAR/ESEF) such as hierarchies, roll-ups and text blocks, relying on Charles Hoffman's work - alternate syntaxes: JSON, CSV, XHTML (Inline XBRL)