XPath Assistance

Hello,
I am going through  the 'Java and XSLT' book and I ran into a chapter about 
Xpath:

I have been seeing a lot fo examples that use what I believe are predicates:

eg:
    <xsl:apply-templates 
select="presidents/president/name[child::first='John']"/>
            <xsl:apply-templates 
select="presidents/president[count(vicePresident) = 0]/name"/>
           <xsl:apply-templates select="presidents/president[position() = 
3]/name"/>

etc.

I thought I would be smart to figure out what predicates are available and 
surfed over to the w3.org web site. Then went to link 6.2 Expressions:
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-xslt-19990421#NT-Predicate

But I do not see any of  the above predicates?

I would like to know what I can use there, but do not understand possibly all 
the different ones:

Also, in the above example: child::first='John'
How could I find John if the name was lower case john?
Eg: I would like to find John or john or JOHN or JOhn.

If there is a better site to refer to please include:

Sincerely
Scott

 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list