Need help with advanced CSS selectors

[C55inator]

I'm working on a CSS dropdown menu based on son of suckerfish. I would like to know if there is a CSS selector to select elements directly before a given element. To give an example:

<li><a href="#">1.1</a></li>
<li>
   <a href="#">1</a>
   <ul>
       <li><a href="#">1.1</a></li>
   </ul>
</li>

I want to select all links that are before <ul> tags.

I know that I can use "li a+ul {}" to select all ul tags in list items that immediately follow a tags, but How can I select a tags before ul tags?

Without javascript.

[boogyman]

apply a rule for all list-item anchors, then apply a different rule for unordered lists that are siblings of the anchor

li a {}
li a + ul {}

<li><a href=""></a></li>
<li>
    <ul>
          <li><a href=""></a></li>
    </ul>
</li>

[C55inator]

Thank you for trying, but that still only gives me a rule for the unordered lists and a rule for all of the anchors.

I found a CSS 3 selector that is just what I'm looking for. a ~ ul {} is what I want, however, this will only work in modern browsers. Most people are using IE 6 or 7, so I'm either going to have to come up with a strange combination of selectors, write a .js hack, or give up and use class selectors.

I'm just going to give up on supporting old browsers, as this isn't a "Key" section.

The CSS 3 selectors are incredibly useful, by the way.
Here's the w3c page

Thanks a lot.