With the exception of attorneys, few people have as much to gain from the flush of earnings restatements as do boosters of the Extensible Business Reporting Language. XBRL is designed to make financial reports easier to post on the Internet and easier to understand once they're posted. And it's getting an important tryout beginning this week.

The Nasdaq Stock Market, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Microsoft are joining forces on an XBRL pilot program. This is the first time any market has openly embraced the language. It's an open specification that uses XML-based tags to describe financial data in business reports and databases.

During the pilot, investors will have access to XBRL-enabled financial data from five years worth of earnings reports filed by 21 chipmakers, starting with each company's most recent earnings report. Nasdaq extracted the federal filing data for the companies, and PricewaterhouseCoopers consultants tagged each of the documents in XBRL, which eliminates the need for manual data entry. (For more on XBRL, see New Language Spurs Electronic Information Filing.)

Now information only needs to be entered into an XBRL-tagged document once and can then be rendered in any form--such as an HTML document, an Edgar filing document, or another specialized report. "XBRL is a way to really improve transparency for investors and the timely delivery of standardized Securities and Exchange Commission data," says John Delta, a Nasdaq VP. Delta works in the interactive services area, which developed the pilot program. Further improving the transparency are links to footnotes within each financial data field. Footnotes generally contain explanations of certain figures presented but typically are hidden in the back of a paper reports.

Using XBRL, reporting fields are standardized. "If I'm looking at the revenue lines, I know exactly what I'm looking at," Delta says. "But you really still need the analytical tools to make that information usable." That's where Microsoft comes in. Its Office and spreadsheet apps, with their built-in analytical capabilities, will extract and format data.

Making financial statements more transparent will allow more granular analysis of the financial information, but it's still not going to clean up corrupt executives, says Liv Watson, director of XBRL at Edgar Online. "But the transparency will make it easier to look at how they're recognizing revenue and information," she says. "By driving them to commonality, they're going to think more about how they disclose their financials."