thx for these links, that are some excellent resources and quite informative
however I can t really agree with the thesis of using indexed triangle lists instead of strips, huge hoppes show quite well that you can efficiently implement cache friendly strips and nvtristrip provides you a library that does all this for you
as for multi pass character skinning, the costs of shaders apply to the indexed lists as well plus you spend more bandwidth to submit vertex data if using indexed tri lists
the local cache optimization suggested by huge hoppes will counter this problem quite good i think