Thought about generating a load of database content to check it out?
As for server load, not that Teh is slow, but I don't think we get a great deal of traffic - I bet you could simulate it with relative ease. Matt, what's our bandwidth use / hits like?
OK, if you're doing MVC, then you do SEO (and improve accessibility generally, btw) by using jQuery to do progressive enhancement. So, you have your page layouts and you can render those to traditional HTML, but you can also get your controller methods to return JSON if the client asks for that in the request header.
On the page load of the initial page, you run a jQuery function to find all the links on the pages and replace them with AJAX requests for the JSON data which you can then render client-side (take a look at the new Templates plug-in for that while you're at it).
Since SE spiders don't implement Javascript, they'll get the old-style traditional HTML, as will Readers for the visually impaired.
Easy.
I had considered that. But loading entire pages through JSON results in the URL being wrong unless you use one of those systems that appends a # into the URL, no?
Still, I'll bear it in mind, cheers. I'm still keen on XSL simply because it means zero change of one of the design people having access to backend code through <% %> tags. But that might just be my paranoia kicking in.
Could you not just have the Javascript append "&format=json" to the request URLs, then let your request handler deal with things depending on the presence of that parameter?
edit: that's how I plan on doing it, so if it's not good way, let me know so I can avoid any problems :D
Oh yes, you could. But the original page URL wouldn't change because you'd be loading content via AJAX. To get around this, people end up using URLs like:
http://www.mysite.com/#category/page
and change the part after the # dynamically. It's not a big issue (Facebook gets away with it quite nicely) but it offends my OCD tendencies.
It is one of the reasons I've been looking at XSLT/XML pages. The XSLT files are totally cachable, so when you're looking at similar pages of content (i.e., forum posts) you can use the template over and over again.
Low bandwidth! Huzzah!