XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) is a powerful, open source technology for managing the organization, transmission, and presentation of business information. It combines a universal, accessible, and consistent standard with the capacity to be extended indefinitely to meet particular needs. However, one of the most difficult and unexpected challenges to the spread of XBRL has turned out to be resistance from international regulators, especially in the U.S. and EU. The XBRL free standard was originally developed by Charles Hoffman in 1998; in 2000, the University of Huelva in Spain became a center for consolidating development between the U.S. and EU. XBRL belongs to the family of markup or metadata languages, of which the best known is familiar HTML. The widely used XML metalanguage differs from HTML in not being restricted to a fixed number of tags, allowing regularized creation of new ones as needed. This and related enhancements have been incorporated into XBRL, which rapidly got the favorable attention of the accounting world. However, international regulators have been resistant to XBRL for a variety of interlinked reasons. They have committed themselves to and invested heavily in their existing systems, have limited time and expertise to learn about and evaluate XBRL, and may be uncomfortable with the security of an open standards solution. The keys to persuading them are demonstrating that XBRL is fully compatible with existing systems, and providing simple free online XBRL tools via Yahoo! or Google Groups.