Bowne Viewer Updated With Latest SEC XBRL Rendering Engine

In a previous post I provided an overview of the different XBRL viewers currently in place at the SEC.  The "original"/Voluntary Program XBRL Viewer has been relegated to "the cheap seats" now that a new XBRL rendering engine is driving the display of live-filed XBRL mandate submissions (click on the blue "Interactive Data" button on our latest filing here) as well as documents uploaded to the SEC's Previewer.

Given the visual enhancements made by the SEC in this new rendering engine, and given the SEC is kind enough to continue to make this code available in an open source format, we've now updated the Bowne Interactive XBRL Viewer to render all uploaded XBRL documents using this new rendering engine.  This enhancement once again puts the Bowne Viewer in synch with the renderings being provided by the SEC while providing additional review and approval capabilities not available on the SEC Previewer.

In addition, and unlike the current SEC Previewer, the Bowne Viewer also provides mandate-level technical validation feedback on any uploaded XBRL documents.  Documents currently uploaded to the SEC Previewer are not passed through the SEC's XBRL validators as part of the upload and preview process.  Whether the SEC changes this going forward, we'll have to see...but the Bowne Viewer is ready today to do both (validate and review/approve!).

We hope you enjoy the new functionality, and let us know what you think!

-Rob 

Comments

[Jeff]

Looking at Bowne's latest interactive filings, from the link you provided, the footnotes don't appear to render on the SEC's engine - I see lots of tags and code. I noticed this with our package as well when we used the IDEA Previewer. However, using the Bowne Viewer, everything looks good (looks like HTML financial footnotes).

Any idea why? Should it be a concern when submitting XBRL files to SEC, or are the footnotes supposed to render like this?

[Ed]

Jeff - It might be browser dependent. The block tagged footnotes are submitted to EDGAR in "escaped HTML" format. The content needs to be un-escaped then presented to the browser for rendering. For the SEC's viewer IE seems to work best. My Firefox browser looks exactly the way you describe. Bowne's viewer does a nice job in either browser.