Automation Framework: Specifying Element Type such as Button/Link/Dropdown Considered Harmful

I have worked in 5 frameworks over the past 12 years and although I keep seeing it, I am still unconvinced that knowing the exact type of your element adds value.  If I want to click an Element, I call .click().  Knowing that it's a Button or Link certainly makes no difference because the interfaces to those element types are the same.  Knowing whether it's a Button or a Dropdown I still argue make no difference, my_element.click() will do what I want it to do.  It's like duck typing in Ruby.  In highly complex systems, having very robust typing may be helpful in avoiding mistakes and making the code easier to read, but most UI automation just isn't that complex.

If I want to know exactly what type of element I'm dealing with, I have to write a bunch of classes such as

class Button (webElement):
  def click():
     self.click()
  ...


class Dropdown (webElement):
  def getOptions():
    select = new Select(self.driver, self.by)
    return select.getOptions()
  ...


Or maybe we could group them into related groups (but how related is related?) such as

class

class Clickable (webElement):
  def click():
     self.click()

class Button (Clickable):
  pass

class Link (Clickable):
  pass
...

This way at least we're saving a little redundancy with shared functionality, but still, what's the point?  I'm all for writing a wrapper for whatever automation tool you're using (Selenium), but without being specific about types.  When the rubber meets the road - i.e. when you're testing your test script - you'll find out if you've done it right.  What I mean is if you think you have a Dropdown and you call getOptions() but you actually have a Link, it'll fail.  You don't have to write the extra code that allows you to call that object a Button or Dropdown object vs an Element object.  If you had that extra code, maybe it would've failed 10 seconds earlier when you tried to instantiate a Dropdown object but passed a button web element to it.

This leads to my next point:  the greater specificity you have in what type of Element you have, the LESS flexible your test is.  If you're testing your application's logic, you shouldn't care as much about clicking a button or a link.  What you should care about is what the user cares about: logging in, placing an order, viewing a document... some business value.  If you care about testing the UI and whether that web element is a button or a link then ok, maybe you should be specific, but I've never worked anywhere that this was the case.

This lack of flexibility will rear its head when your app undergoes a refactor.  When all those buttons turn to links as you move from an older-style UI to a newer one, your tests all break. Even if they don't, you now have all these elements called orderButton or showMapButton which are actually links in the UI.  If you had been using generic Element objects, there would have been no code to change.