> My original reply was compatible with 1.0 as well --
> 
>             <xsl:template match="a | b[position() = 1]"/>
> 
> Which, as David noted in his post, will "lose the stuff you 
> don't want". 
> There are many ways to do this though, and it will depend on 
> how the HTML will vary from the example you provided. 

Both this solution and David Carlisle's handle the example posted, but
neither of them reflect the specification:

I want to extract only the text between the first <br/> tag and the last <a>
anchor tag

which is what I tried to do in my XSLT 2.0 solution.

It's quite possible to achieve that in XSLT 1.0 as well, but it's not much
fun, so I certainly won't attempt it unless there is a clearer statement of
the problem.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/