On Friday, the SEC released its "Financial Explorer" to the public. It's an interface tool that will let investors manipulate XBRL-published financial statements so they can produce charts quickly. You can access the Financial Explorer tool directly at this link.

I spent a little time with it; interesting displays, fairly quick response time. (For what it does, which is still pretty limited.) Is it going to be extremely useful? Not in its current state, which I recognize is simply "early." It's more than a toy, but way less than a tool. The visualizations of the data are nice, but there has to be more meat to it. The site explains that the Explorer tool is designed for the retail investor (aka John Q. Public). But does that mean all that retail investors want is quick pictures of some data, and some visual representations of changes in metrics? If that's all that the system is going to serve up, there might be a whole generation of "retail" investors that never learns about the good stuff in the footnotes or the MD&A.

The site indicates that more data is on its way to presentation, and in theory, there should be all kinds of XBRL readers available in the after-market that will make data manipulation more custom-tailored. The present state of the art does make one consider, however: what role will the Management's Discussion & Analysis play in the XBRL world? That disclosure is one of the most investor-beneficial requirements that the SEC has ever instituted - and it doesn't seem to lend itself well to "data-tagging" and table-structuring. Let's hope the SEC focuses some its imagination on the MD&A as hurtles itself into the XBRL future. Context counts as well as numbers, and that's long been what the MD&A provides investors. How does one tag that?