Re: preceding-sibling reversed ?

you just want
<xsl:value-of select="preceding-sibling::div[@class = 'slide'][1]/@id
to get the nearest previous sibling with slide class.

what you have


<xsl:value-of select="preceding-sibling::div[@class = 'slide' and
position() = 1]/@id

selects the nearest sibling if it has a slide class and nothing
otherwise. If all your div elements have a class="silde" then these are
equivalent, otherwise not.


in the step 
preceding-sibling::div

you are in a reverse axis, so all teh selected nodes are numbered in
reverse document order.

so your filter

[@class = 'slide' and position() = 1]

selects all (at most one) of those nodes that satisify the stated
condition.

however if you do it with two filters first 

preceding-sibling::div[@class = 'slide']

now the resulting node set is renumbered (still in reverse order, as you
are still in the same step) so now the [1] or equivalenetly [position()
= 1] selcts the first of _these_ elements, ie the first element (looking
back) with class slide.

David

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