Early users of XBRL included regulators such as the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation[2] and the Committee of European Banking Supervisors (CEBS).

[4] Within the last ten years, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the United Kingdom's HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), and Singapore's Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA),[5] had begun to require companies to use it, and other regulators were following suit.

XBRL was adopted by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) of India for filing financial and costing information with the Central Government.

Additionally, big taxonomies such as IFRS obey specific rules of naming and labelling to ensure consistency within the schema.

An example that describes definitions of labels of the IFRS element AssetsTotal in English, German and Polish is provided below.

Financial concepts appearing on business reports more often than not stem from regulatory documents issued by authorities.

For example, the IFRS Taxonomy describes financial reports prepared based on IFRSs (Bound Volume).

This helps instance creators and users understand the intended meaning of each element and provides support for its inclusion in the taxonomy.

The example shows that there are defined two calculation arcs providing details concerning relations between Gross profit, Revenue and Cost of Sales.

The problem emerges for example in the Statement of Changes in Equity or Movements in Property, Plant and Equipment where instant elements mix with duration.

The solution to this problem is a formula linkbase that will provide taxonomy creators with many more functions than just simple addition or subtraction.

Secondly, the double entry accounting rule requires XBRL taxonomy creators to define the credit/debit nature of monetary elements appearing in the Balance Sheets and Income Statements.

The definition linkbase provides taxonomy creators with the opportunity to define different kinds of relations between elements.

As its name indicates, taxonomy builders use it to force instance creators to enter the value of one element, if they provide the content of another.

One of the reasons that this type of relation was introduced is the prohibition of schema redefinition which prevents changes in a tuple's content model.

The presentation linkbase stores information about relationships between elements in order to properly organize the taxonomy content.

The presentation linkbase, using parent-child relations organizes elements in this way and helps users find concepts they are interested in.

The XBRL Consortium is currently working on rendering solutions that would provide for the automatic creation of such reports.

The specification does, however, provide a normative schema which requires that any schema-valid iXBRL document should be in XHTML format.

This happens more often when, as in the UK, the company report, which may contain many graphics, is combined with the accounts in a single iXBRL document.

HMRC's Online Filing software is an example of a program which generates iXBRL from source data.

While the resulting report and accounts meets HMRC's requirements, it is not an attractive document to view or read.

iXBRL is mandated for corporate filings by government agencies in Japan, Denmark and the United Kingdom.

In June 2018, the SEC announced plans to move to iXBRL, removing the requirement to file separate HTML and XBRL documents.

[17] XBRL's beginning, in 1998,[18] can be traced to the initial efforts of one person, Charles Hoffman, a Certified Public Accountant from Tacoma, Washington.

The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) was also instrumental in pulling together what eventually became XBRL International.

[23] Results of a comparison of XBRL filings to Forms 10-K revealed multiple errors in signage, amounts, labeling, and classification.

A different conclusion was reached by Du et al., 2013 [24] who argued that companies are going through a learning curve and are steadily improving.

[25] An evaluation by Debreceny, Roger S., et al. 2005, of the impact of Financial Reporting in XBRL on the SEC's EDGAR System.

[27] Corporate governance is significantly and positively associated with a firm's decision to be an early and voluntary filer of financial information in XBRL format.