Topologi announced the availability of the Topologi Difference Detective, a low-cost, lightweight utility for displaying changes between different versions of files, including XML data. The Difference Detective is a utility for anyone involved in document editing or XSLT transformation. The Topologi Difference Detective supports three levels of reporting. For small, dense files such as XSLT scripts or XML Schemas there is a detailed word-by-word comparison showing all additions and deletions. For larger text files up to 100K size, a line-by-line comparison is available and for large and binary files, a byte-by-byte comparison quickly detects where two files are not the same. The Topologi Difference Detective also has a directory comparison mode, to compare files with the same names in two different directories. The Difference Detective is available now from the Topologi Tool Shop, as are a number of other utilities for querying and validating collections of XML data. There are several products due for release in the near future, including tools for helping with whitespace, links and character sets.
Day: April 7, 2005
One of the cover stories on the new, April Journal of Accountancy carries the blurb: “Six Reasons to Love XBRL.” The article is actually part of continuing coverage by the American Institute of Public Accountants
(AICPA). The AICPA’s commitment to making CPAs increasingly aware of XBRL
is a good thing if you are interested in seeing more and more ability to do
intelligent processing of financial documents.
One unfortunate thing about the article, though, is that the six reasons to
love XBRL are all focused primarily on its use outside the company–after
you have produced financial statements in XBRL. As I have noted
before, some of the really interesting applications–applications that could
be used as part of an internal control framework–happen only if you begin using
it inside the company and earlier in the process.
I think we’ll get there.
By the way, there is a conference on
XBRL coming up in Boston later this month that you might be interested in if
you are wanting to learn more about XBRL and its applications.
Our survey on enterprise blogs, wiki and RSS use was out of commission for a few days because the vendor of the survey service upgraded their software and broke a few things. The short survey is back online now. We’ll be posting the results next week during our conference in time for our session on the same topic. BTW, we are going to open this session (Wednesday morning 8:30 -10:00am) to anyone who is there, even if their badge is only for the technology demonstrations on Monday and Tuesday. So come by and blog it!
