:parent and previous siblings selectors

Hello all,

I've been trying to ascertain whether the :parent selector and previous
siblings selector will be included in CSS3. Reading the mailing list
correspondence, I got the impression that the :parent selector will be
implemented but that the implementation of a previous siblings selector
would be too costly and therefore probably abandoned.
So first of all, could someone please confirm whether my impression is
indeed correct?

Assuming the :parent selector will be implemented, I suppose a possible
workaround for targeting previous siblings would be
to style all the children of that parent like so:
a.classname :parent a{
}

and then remove the style for the following selectors like so:
a.classname ~ a{
}

Would that work?

SG