You are right.. This means, we cannot solve this problem with
  precedings-sibling axis.


Or rather, you just need to structure things to access all the nodes in
the set, eg

<xsl:for-each select="*">
 <xsl:if test="not(preceding-sibling::*[name()=name(current())])">
 ...

or use key (muenchian) grouping which is usually more efficient anyway.

David

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