As I understand, from one of the early Gmail product managers, element class names are the most stable of all the 'fingerprints'. The Javascript data structures are quite stable, and the element IDs change pretty much every session.
(Source: I'm the author of the ActiveInbox Gmail extension, and at various times have spoken to Gmail engineers directly).
I agree a service would be a useful thing. A killer bit of value would be if it could workaround Mozilla's addon rules. (We actually stopped publishing on Mozilla addons, because if Gmail changed, we couldn't wait 10 days to be "re-approved" to fix it, and as mentioned by gkoberger, Mozilla really clamps down on dynamic in-app updates).
Ymmv, but if it helps...
From the POV of an extension developer, service reliability is critical, and I'm not sure if there's enough GMail extension developers to be customers and make it economically viable?
If there is, I think the ideal service would taint DOM elements with class names to make the important things selectable (rather than a Javascript API to retrieve elements). That way, we could build our own selectors with fail safes to fall back on (and we don't have the security headache of incorporating your dynamically-updated code within our own protected sandbox. We can just share the modified DOM instead).
Whatever you do with it, I'm really impressed with how cleanly you built this kartikt!
Maybe it could just be a JSON file with the xpath of all important elements?
Also maybe it doesn't really have to be a service. It could just be a file on github, where anyone could issue a pull request if gets broken broken. That way way you would essentially crowd source it.
(Source: I'm the author of the ActiveInbox Gmail extension, and at various times have spoken to Gmail engineers directly).
I agree a service would be a useful thing. A killer bit of value would be if it could workaround Mozilla's addon rules. (We actually stopped publishing on Mozilla addons, because if Gmail changed, we couldn't wait 10 days to be "re-approved" to fix it, and as mentioned by gkoberger, Mozilla really clamps down on dynamic in-app updates).
Ymmv, but if it helps... From the POV of an extension developer, service reliability is critical, and I'm not sure if there's enough GMail extension developers to be customers and make it economically viable?
If there is, I think the ideal service would taint DOM elements with class names to make the important things selectable (rather than a Javascript API to retrieve elements). That way, we could build our own selectors with fail safes to fall back on (and we don't have the security headache of incorporating your dynamically-updated code within our own protected sandbox. We can just share the modified DOM instead).
Whatever you do with it, I'm really impressed with how cleanly you built this kartikt!