Generate CSS locators

[joao-carloto]

Most experts favor CSS over XPath, however, this is still mater for debate (http://elementalselenium.com/tips/34-xpath-vs-css-revisited-2). The option should be made available.

[joao-carloto]

Some thoughts on this issue:

• There are countless possibilities to locate the same element using CSS (as well as XPath).
• The current XPath generator relies on the following attributes: tag, type, inner text, index and, when necessary, the relationship with some other element with text (following, preceding or parent).
• Using inner text with CSS locators doesn't seem viable. Although a "contains(text)" function exists in some libraries it is not standard, and will not work with selenium. See link http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14595149/alternative-of-contains-in-cssselector-selenium-webdriver

What will then be the best strategy to build CSS locators automatically? Some examples from people who work with them, on a regular basis, would be useful.

Contributions to this issue are welcome.

[joao-carloto]

I'm holding off this feature for the following reasons:

1. The use of CSS as a locator could assume many forms, but several would be redundant with the already available locators (id, name, href, src, etc).
2. Referencing the class might be useful, however in many situations it would be difficult to make the locator unique. There's no direct equivalent to '[x]' (index) from XPath in CSS. Things like ':nth-of-type' work in a parent-child context and it would be difficult to make an algorithm to make locators unique in many situations.
3. Reference to text is not available in Selenium Web Driver, since the contains() pseudo-class was deprecated (I heard it works on Selenium IDE).
4. The often advertised advantages of CSS over XPath seem to be inaccurate or at least exaggerated (see http://elementalselenium.com/tips/34-xpath-vs-css-revisited-2).