How to access CSS generated content with JavaScript

Question

I cannot find any interface to access the real live value. [of the counter]

Yeah. I don't think there is one. Sorry.

The only thing I can think of would be to go through every element (including its :before/:after pseudo-elements) before the element in the document, looking for counters and adding up how many there are.

Obviously that's hideous. If you're going to try to reproduce the browser's own counter mechanism it would probably be easier (and much more compatible, given IE<=7's lack of counter/content support) to just replace it with your own script-based counters. eg. something along the lines of:

<a href="#prettypicture">this</a>

<div class="counter level=0">...</div>
<img id="prettypicture" class="counter level=1" alt="ooo, pretty"/>

window.onload= function() {
    var counters= Node_getElementsByClassName(document.body, 'counter');
    var indices= [];
    for (var counteri= 0; counteri<counters.length; counteri++) {
        var counter= counters[counteri];

        var level= Element_getClassArgument(counter, 'level');
        while (indices.length<=level)
            indices.push(0);
        indices[level]++;
        indices= indices.slice(level+1);
        var text= document.createTextNode('Figure '+indices.join('.'));
        counter.parentNode.insertBefore(text, counter.nextSibling);

        if (counter.id!=='') {
            for (var linki= document.links.length; linki-->0;) {
                var link= document.links[i];
                if (
                    link.hostname===location.hostname && link.pathname===location.pathname &&
                    link.search===location.search && link.hash==='#'+counter.id
                ) {
                    var text= document.createTextNode('('+indices.join('.')+')');
                    link.parentNode.insertBefore(text, link.nextSibling);
                }
            }
        }
    }
};

read this:

• http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/generate.html#propdef-content

Generated content does not alter the document tree. In particular, it is not fed back to the document language processor (e.g., for reparsing).

---

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS/Getting_Started/Content

Content specified in a stylesheet does not become part of the DOM.

so for this reason the getComputedStyle will not work in this case; i think the only way, is to perform a classic loop through as someone has described below!

I would port your css to Javascript, this enables you to get the figure caption and also you get greater browser coverage. Using jQuery you'd do something like this:

$(function() {
  var section = 0;
  $(".section").each(function() {
    section++;
    var figure = 0;
    $(this).find("img.figure").each(function() {
      figure++;
      var s = "Fig. " + section + "." + figure;
      $(this).attr({alt:s}).after(s);
    });
  });
});

Then you could do:

<div class="section">blabla <img id="foo" src="http://www.example.com/foo.jpg"></div>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet <a href="#foo" class="figurereference">see here</a></p>

<script type="text/javascript">
  $(function() {
    $("a.figurereference").each(function() {
      var selector = $(this).attr("href");
      var $img = $(selector);
      var s = $(this).text() + " (" + $img.attr("alt") + ")";
      $(this).text(s);
    });
  });
</script>

Though I agree that doing this using CSS would be very neat.