Stripping whitespace & numbering without XSLT

["Respess, Christe" <crespess@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello:

As I am limited to using the XSL implemented by IE5, I'm having trouble
doing a couple of things that I've only seen done using XSLT.  As I'm
quite new to XSL, I'm hoping that I may get some suggestions on how to
get around this limitation.

1.  In my XML document, hyperlink text has a trailing space.  When I
surround the text with anchor tags, the space is included in the link.
The text following the hyperlink text therefore appears as though it is
not spaced from the link at all.  If I place a space after I close the
anchor, it apparently gets consolidated by HTML into the space that's
included in the hyperlink text.  It seems that normalize-string() would
be perfect for this if I were able to use it.  Is there a way to trim
this trailing whitespace with bare bones XSL?

2.  I need to print out captions to linked graphics as I encounter
GRAPHIC elements in the document text.  However, the caption text must
include the graphic number, which is not information provided by the
element.  The graphic number could be divined from the index of the
GRAPHIC element relative to all GRAPHIC elements in the entire XML
document.  I don't think that I can use index() for this, but maybe I
just don't know how to use it correctly.  I believe this is something
<xsl:number> in XSLT is well-suited for.  I was thinking that I could
get this done by implementing a script but wanted to know if there were
a more elegant/simple way of accomplishing it.  A example of the GRAPHIC
element structure and what I need to do follows.

----------------------------------

<P />
Blah Blah
<P />

<GRAPHIC>
<CAPTION>I am the first GRAPHIC element in the document</CAPTION>
</GRAPHIC>

<P />
More Blah Blah
<P />

<GRAPHIC>
<CAPTION>I am the second GRAPHIC element in the document</CAPTION>
</GRAPHIC>

----------------------------------

OUTPUT should be:


Blah Blah

Fig. 1: I am the first GRAPHIC element in the document

More Blah Blah

Fig 2: I am the second GRAPHIC element in the document

----------------------------------

Thanks for any tips you may have!

Christe


 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list