When you come across something interesting on the web, but don’t have time to read it at that moment, what do you do?The old way is to add the web page to your browser’s bookmarks or favourites so you can retrieve it when you do have time.

A more recent method is to add that page of interest to a social bookmarking site such as del.icio.us.

This has two additional advantages - you can tag the page with keywords so you can share your bookmarked content with others, and you can access your bookmarked content from any other computer or device with a connection to the internet.

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This could be a milestone in illustrating the benefits of using XBRL for companies filing financial data.Last week, Microsoft submitted a Form 8-K filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) comprising financial data for shareholders, using XBRL.

Why is this significant?

First, it needs a bit of understanding as to what XBRL is. Simple explanation: it’s an emerging XML-based standard to define and exchange business and financial performance information. For more, read the technical description on Wikipedia.

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There are a few ways of persisting XML to a file, each with their pros and cons, that programmers may want to consider.

Brett D. McLaughlin, Sr., of O’Reilly Media, penned a post on XML persistence and ways to accomplish it. “You can do all sorts of interesting things with XML, but if you can’t persist it to a file, it’s all for naught,” he wrote.

Web services and other programming tasks may demand XML store its data someplace. Writing to a file may not be interesting or sexy, but it is necessary. McLaughlin listed three “pretty common mainstream” ways programmers likely accomplish this today:

1. Using the DOM and JDOM APIs and the like directly to write to a file from your XML data structure
2. Using the Transformation API for XML (TrAX) and the identity transformation to persist your XML
3. Using a higher-level API like JAXB to handle persistence (more…)