There's no need to execute all the JavaScript that comes back from the server - if they're following the spec, all you have to do is escape the fragment and toss it over to a CGI arg.
Another option is progressive enhancement, where you make every link point to a valid page and then add onclick event handlers that override the click event to do whatever JavaScript you want it to. I think this is a far superior option in general, but it has various issues in latency and coding complexity, so a good portion of web developers didn't do it anyway.
But as Tim says, the spec proposed by Google is only meant to fix some problems (can't be searched by search engines) caused by using this URL scheme. It isn't meant to be a one-guide-fits-all approach making AJAX content addressable.
In other words the spec treats one of the symptoms, not the original problem.
http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/specification.h...
So when you see the lifehacker URL in the article, you know that there's an equivalent non-AJAX URL available with the same content at:
http://lifehacker.com/?_escaped_fragment_=5753509/hello-worl...
There's no need to execute all the JavaScript that comes back from the server - if they're following the spec, all you have to do is escape the fragment and toss it over to a CGI arg.
Another option is progressive enhancement, where you make every link point to a valid page and then add onclick event handlers that override the click event to do whatever JavaScript you want it to. I think this is a far superior option in general, but it has various issues in latency and coding complexity, so a good portion of web developers didn't do it anyway.