Block Tagging

Tagging, at a high level, is a way of defining the content that lives between the tags. How you define the content is, in part, driven by how granular you get. Tagging a name could be as simple as

<name>Mark Twain</name>

Or it could be more granular like

<name>
    <firstname>Mark</firstname>
    <lastname>Twain</lastname>
</name>

Much of the actually tagging we'll do for the SEC is very granular. In the financial statements we tag at the most granular level. Here is a number representing operating expenses.

<us-gaap:OperatingExpenses contextRef="Context1" unitRef="USD" decimals="INF">115890000</us-gaap:OperatingExpenses>

In the Notes there are some options. You could tag tabular data inside a Note just like you tag the financial statements. You could even pull out numbers that are embedded in the text and tag those separately.

However, the SEC is only asking you to identify the Note itself in the first year of mandated filing. So all of the content inside each Note in the filing goes inside a single tag. Tables and all. Each Note gets a separate tag. Below is an example (you can click on the graphic to see it full size). In year 2 of your mandated XBRL filings the SEC is asking for detailed Notes tagging although that hasn't been defined yet. We'll see what the proposal says.

-- Ed Hodder