As the UK Government finalises its draconian plans to implement XBRL filing of Company Accounts in 2011 and the US SEC has imposed mandatory filing in XBRL on about 500 companies this year, Microsoft loses out on an obscure patent stopping it shipping Word with embedded XML.

So what's all the fuss about? XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) has been around for 10 years - it's a form of XML (Extensible Mark-up Language) which has been around a lot longer. A mark-up language is a dictionary of tags that allows a computer program to describe the text. So Word uses its own 'tags' to describe the text e.g. paragraph, capitals etc. HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language) is a basic mark-up language used for web-pages. XML is a generic form of tags enabling marked-up text to be used for a variety of applications e.g. mobile phone text messages, eCommerce etc. It was developed by the WWW (World Wide Web) consortium as an open standard. XBRL takes these tags a stage further and describes the environment that a set of financial accounts have been drawn up e.g. year, period, account name etc. All of these tagging tools are designed to be read my computers - they are gobbledygook to the untrained eye.

To help mere humans read these formatted messages Microsoft embedded HTML and XML tags into its Word and Excel programs to enable documents structured in these formats to be read and exported in its word processor and spreadsheet packages. You can imagine Microsoft's astonishment when a little know Canadian software house, aptly named i4i, patents the idea of linking XML to Word in 1998 and proceeds to sue Microsoft in the US courts earlier this year - and wins an injunction to stop Microsoft selling Word with this functionality. But wasn't XML an open standard?

It's the same problem that the UK Government has with its XBRL filing in 2011- the XBRL is designed to be read by computers - not humans. So how do we, when submitting the return, and the tax inspector, receiving the information, read what we have sent. The latest answer is a new concept called iXBRL - Inline Extensible Business Reporting Language - a bridge between HTML and XBRL to enable XBRL documents to be read by humans. Its new - few applications can use it - initially it may be expensive.

At the moment online filing of Corporation Tax in the UK uses a mixture of XML and pdf (Portable Document Format). Most of us can read pdf files using free downloadable software. But we cannot generate our documents in pdf unless we buy an application (only on PC's -provided free on Apple computers). However most accounting systems now have a pdf generator built in to enable their customers to generate the financial accounts. At present it is a problem exporting the computation sheet, usually developed in a spreadsheet, in the pdf format. Microsoft still does not provide a pdf converter in its Word and Excel packages.

HMRC will not allow Corporation Tax supporting documents (statutory accounts and computation sheets) in pdf format after 2011 - their objective is to get this information in XBRL. Hence iXBRL - which will certainly not be as readily available as pdf generators are now. I doubt if Microsoft will be an early adopter of iXBRL in its Office Suite. Alternatively one can use HMRC's online submission software which preformats this information.