[🚀 Feature]: deprecate WebElement.getAttribute

[joerg1985]

Feature and motivation

WebElement.getDomAttribute and WebElement.getDomProperty have been added in Selenium 4.

It might be good to deprecate WebElement.getAttribute to remove it at a undefined time in the future.

Usage example

This would warn people to move to the 'new' methods when maintaining existing code.

[github-actions[bot]]

@joerg1985, thank you for creating this issue. We will troubleshoot it as soon as we can.

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[titusfortner]

Bold.

I'm not completely against the idea, but also not sure it's the right call.

[NCLnclNCL]

Feature and motivation

WebElement.getDomAttribute and WebElement.getDomProperty have been added in Selenium 4.

It might be good to deprecate WebElement.getAttribute to remove it at a undefined time in the future.

Usage example

This would warn people to move to the 'new' methods when maintaining existing code.

Let me ask, are the 3 APIs above different?

[titusfortner]

getAttribute() assumes that people don't know the difference between a property and an attribute and don't want to be bothered to figure it out (a decent assumption), so it uses a bunch of fancy JavaScript that does a pretty good job of guessing whether the user is looking for the property or the attribute and returning that value. It's great convenience, but it is now implemented with a client side atom which means a large payload gets sent to the driver/server on every usage.

The ideal world people figure out if they want an attribute or property and use the correct method. But that might be asking a lot of users, and we already have the code right there...

[joerg1985]

I was reading the blog post and the javadoc before opening the issue, this gave me the feeling the getAttribute method is the legacy way of reading attributes/properties.

If this is not true and there are no plans to ever remove the getAttribute method, this issue can be closed.

If this is a legacy method, it might be good to mark it deprecated or make a clear statement in the docs to ensure no new code is using this. I agree there is alot of code using this, therefore a deprecation notice could be added, something like: don't panic, this method will not be removed before selenium 6, but should not be used in new code.

[titusfortner]

It would definitely be valuable to encourage people to use the other methods.

[titusfortner]

We decided in TLC Meeting 1/18 that we would go ahead and mark this feature deprecated to encourage people to move to the more precise property and attribute methods.

We need a blog post explaining everything though, and I'm still not sure we want to actually remove it any time soon because it is quite useful.