I realize this has been a few other questions on this topic, and people are saying use your language of choice to manipulate the XML etc etc however, not quite fit my question exactly.

Firstly, the scope of the project: We want to develop platform independent e-learning, currently, its a bunch of HTML pages but as they grow and develop they become hard to maintain.

The idea: Generate up an XML file + Schema, then produce some XSLT files that process the XML into the eLearning modiles. XML to HTML via XSLT.

Why: We would like the flexibilty to be able to easy reformat the content (I realize CSS is a viable alternative here) If we decide to alter the pages layout or functionality in anyway, im guessing altering the "shared" XSLT files would be easier than updating the HTML files. So far, we have about 30 modules, with up to 10-30 pages each Depending on some "parameters" we could output drastically different page layouts/structures, above and beyond what CSS can do

Now, all this has to be platform independent, and to be able to run "offline" i.e. without a server powering the HTML

Negatives I've read so far for XSLT: Overhead? Not exactly sure why...is it the compute power need to convert to HTML? Difficult to learn Better alternatives

Now, what I would like to know exactly is:

are there actually any viable alternatives for this "offline"? Am I going about it in the correct manner, do you guys have any advice or alternatives.

Thanks!