> 
> does the preceding-sibling axis look at the document or the 
> current context
> node-set?  In my trials it seems to look at all the siblings 
> in the document
> rather than just the context node set.

That's what Kay's book seems to say. See page 336 and 338:

An axis is a path through the document tree...

preceding-sibling
This selects all the nodes that precedthe origin node, and that are children
of the same parent node, in reverse document order.  If the origin is a root
node, an attribute node, or a namespace node, then the preceding-sibling
axis will always be empty.

> If it is not designed to look at the node-set, then is it 
> possible to see
> the previous node of the current context node-set some other way?

Sorry, can't help you here.




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