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As a 2014 follow up to anyone reading this thread, Google later released a tag labeled "x-default" that should make the self-referencing canonical question moot. Read more at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/x-default-hreflang-for-international-pages.html

As a response to my own question, I received some other good suggestions to this issue via Twitter: @__jasonmulligan__ suggested XSLT @__KevinMSpence__ suggested "...easiest solution would be to use simplexml --it's a PHP parser for lightweight XML" & "Just keep in mind that simplexml loads the doc into memory, so there can be performance issues with large docs." Someone suggested creating a feed from the XML, but I don't think that adds a ton of benefit aside from another step, since you'd still need a way to pull that content on to the page. There were also a few suggestions for ways to convert the XML feed to another solution like JSON on the page, but those were really outside the scope of what we were looking to do. Final recommendation to the client was to just add text links manually beneath all of the Javascript content, since they only were adding a few portfolio entries per year, and it would look good in the theme. A hack, perhaps, but much faster and cost-effective. Otherwise, would have recommended they go with PHP plus the simplexml recommendation from above.