Re: applying templates to all but ...

Except the [1] you put near the end is saying to use the first in the
list; right?

yes or no (depending on what you mean) It doesn't take the first in
_that_ list there would be no point in doing ('article-newspaper','article')[1]
as that's just a long way of writing 'article-newspaper' it takes teh
first element in the sequence of cs:reftype nodes obtained by selecting
the cs:reftypes with name attribute equal to an item in the list.

<xsl:apply-templates
select="$style-biblio/(for $t in ('article-newspaper','article')
                return cs:reftype[@name=$t])[1]/cs:*">

... in practice you'd want to put the list into a variable or pull it
from a config file or something.