<story><title>Show HN: Gmail.js – JavaScript API for Gmail</title><url>https://github.com/KartikTalwar/gmail.js</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>gkoberger</author><text>It would be amazing if this were a service. Easier said than done, I know -- but, basically this but have it check a JSON file every few hours and gets the updated selectors.&lt;p&gt;(For people who don&amp;#x27;t know, all GMail&amp;#x27;s classes and IDs are things like &amp;#x27;.xb3&amp;#x27;, and they change often.)&lt;p&gt;Having worked on Mozilla Add-ons for a long time, one of the biggest problems was by the time any G-Mail add-on was approved, it was already out of date again. API calls, when done correctly, are allowed by both Chrome and Firefox -- this could be a good solution.&lt;p&gt;(You could easily charge a few bucks for this, and even contact Firefox + Chrome about making sure the reviewers allow it. Market it as &amp;quot;cutting down on their time&amp;quot; since there will be less to review.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andymitchell</author><text>As I understand, from one of the early Gmail product managers, element class names are the most stable of all the &amp;#x27;fingerprints&amp;#x27;. The Javascript data structures are quite stable, and the element IDs change pretty much every session.&lt;p&gt;(Source: I&amp;#x27;m the author of the ActiveInbox Gmail extension, and at various times have spoken to Gmail engineers directly).&lt;p&gt;I agree a service would be a useful thing. A killer bit of value would be if it could workaround Mozilla&amp;#x27;s addon rules. (We actually stopped publishing on Mozilla addons, because if Gmail changed, we couldn&amp;#x27;t wait 10 days to be &amp;quot;re-approved&amp;quot; to fix it, and as mentioned by gkoberger, Mozilla really clamps down on dynamic in-app updates).&lt;p&gt;Ymmv, but if it helps...
From the POV of an extension developer, service reliability is critical, and I&amp;#x27;m not sure if there&amp;#x27;s enough GMail extension developers to be customers and make it economically viable?&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;t have the security headache of incorporating your dynamically-updated code within our own protected sandbox. We can just share the modified DOM instead).&lt;p&gt;Whatever you do with it, I&amp;#x27;m really impressed with how cleanly you built this kartikt!</text></comment>
<story><title>Show HN: Gmail.js – JavaScript API for Gmail</title><url>https://github.com/KartikTalwar/gmail.js</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>gkoberger</author><text>It would be amazing if this were a service. Easier said than done, I know -- but, basically this but have it check a JSON file every few hours and gets the updated selectors.&lt;p&gt;(For people who don&amp;#x27;t know, all GMail&amp;#x27;s classes and IDs are things like &amp;#x27;.xb3&amp;#x27;, and they change often.)&lt;p&gt;Having worked on Mozilla Add-ons for a long time, one of the biggest problems was by the time any G-Mail add-on was approved, it was already out of date again. API calls, when done correctly, are allowed by both Chrome and Firefox -- this could be a good solution.&lt;p&gt;(You could easily charge a few bucks for this, and even contact Firefox + Chrome about making sure the reviewers allow it. Market it as &amp;quot;cutting down on their time&amp;quot; since there will be less to review.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>loceng</author><text>Not sure Google would like this?</text></comment>