Trying to account for all the possibilities of the FGDC is a losing battle. At least, I've made my retreat, and we've been using a simplified XSL on our site.
Rather than relying on custom code for each element of the FGDC metadata structure, our stylesheet preserves the nesting structure of the XML elements, labeling each with the human-readable label found in a separate "fgdc_labels.xml" file. The result is a much-simplified XSL.
Trying to account for all the possibilities of the FGDC is a losing battle. At least, I've made my retreat, and we've been using a simplified XSL on our site.
Rather than relying on custom code for each element of the FGDC metadata structure, our stylesheet preserves the nesting structure of the XML elements, labeling each with the human-readable label found in a separate "fgdc_labels.xml" file. The result is a much-simplified XSL.
If you want to take a look, I cleaned out our institution-specific stuff, and put a copy in this gist: https://gist.github.com/kgjenkins/fa8b46d619f1dd1d90befaadd1e793c3
What would you think about using an approach like that?