Official Google Webmaster Blog: A proposal for making AJAX crawlable. It’s horrible! The Google crawler would map url#!state to url?_escaped_fragment_=state, then expect your site to provide rendered HTML that reflects that state (they even go as far as to suggest running a headless browser within your web server to do this). Just stick to progressive enhancement instead, it’s far less hideous. It looks like the proposal may have originated with the GWT team.
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I thought Artur Ortega's proposal, in the comments, to use ARIA attributes along with eg. NVDA to crawl AJAX was interesting, and much more practical than the original proposal. Plus, from a cynical point of view, it might increase take-up of ARIA among front-end people if it helped search engines crawl sites.
Jim O'Donnell - 9th October 2009 00:33 - #
Yikes, they're insane.
Michal Migurski - 9th October 2009 07:33 - #