XBRL-based Digital Financial Reporting

I began my career in accounting in 1982 as an auditor with Price Waterhouse when accounting and audit working papers and schedules were 100% paper.  But within three months, I was creating many of those same working papers and schedules first in VisiCalc and then Lotus 1-2-3.  I would create those schedules and working papers electronically, then print them out, and tape them into the bundle of paper that supported our audits. The Compaq luggable computer was invented and electronic spreadsheets where even more compelling. Today, accounting and audit working papers tend to be 100% electronic proxies for those paper documents created in Excel or some other electronic spreadsheet, Word or some other word processing document, PDF generated from some word processing document, and maybe HTML.  All of these are presentation oriented proxies for documents and none of them is truly understandable by a computer based process. The next step in the evolution of accounting and audi...