Rational for this key?

[ioquatix]

The web element identifier is the string constant "element-6066-11e4-a52e-4f735466cecf".

Apologies for this question, but at first when Copilot auto-completed this in my custom webdriver implementation, I thought it was a bug.

After I checked the spec, I found out the code really should use this key, e.g.

module Async
  module WebDriver
    module Scope
      # The web element identifier is the string constant "element-6066-11e4-a52e-4f735466cecf".
      ELEMENT_KEY = "element-6066-11e4-a52e-4f735466cecf"

      def find_element(using, value)
        reply = post("element", {using: using, value: value})

        return Element.new(self.session, reply[ELEMENT_KEY])
      end

What is the rational for using what seems to be a particularly high-entropy key for what is expected to be a fairly common and unambiguous operation? Can we add this to the documentation/specification?

[whimboo]

The element identifier similar to ShadowRoot, window, and frame are relicts from the early implementations of Selenium we we kept it along to prevent backward incompatibilities. As such this also wont change anymore.

Note that for WebDriver BiDi a different serialization logic is used so that those arbitrary ids are not needed anymore, but are still internally shared by the browser to allow protocol interoperability.

[ioquatix]

My point was not to change them, but to add clarifications as to why they exist in the spec.