Difference between JsonWireProtocol mechanisms and the new standards in W3C Living Document when using Selenium

Question

I'm wondering what are the differences between the mechanisms in JsonWireProtocol ( Status: OBSOLETE ) and W3C Living Document from 31 December 2019 ( the new standard ) when using Selenium for UI tests. I know that Selenium have used the following: When we make a new instance of a driver (C#):

using OpenQA.Selenium;
using OpenQA.Selenium.Chrome;
IWebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();

we actually make a POST /session request to the selenium server. After that via JsonWireProtocol and, in example:

POST /session/:sessionId/element/:id/click , we can find and click on particular element, or make some other actions with the other requests...

So what are the new things nowadays? Can someone explain the new standard?! I will be very happy if someone do that in-depth!

WebDriver W3C Living Document 31 December 2019

JsonWireProtocol

Answer 1

The WebDriver Wire Protocol

The initial WebDriver Wire Protocol draft was a proposal that, all implementations of WebDriver that would communicate with the browser, or a RemoteWebDriver server shall use a common wire protocol. This wire protocol defined a RESTful web service using JSON over HTTP.

As per the initial proposal and practice some of the JSON Objects were as follows:

• WebElement JSON Object : The JSON representation of a WebElement for transmission over the wire. This object will have the following properties:

• Capabilities JSON Object : Not all server implementations will support every WebDriver feature. Therefore, the client and server should use JSON objects with the properties listed below when describing which features a session supports.
• Desired Capabilities : A Capabilities JSON Object sent by the client describing the capabilities a new session created by the server should possess. Any omitted keys implicitly indicate the corresponding capability is irrelevant. More at DesiredCapabilities .
• Actual Capabilities : A Capabilities JSON Object returned by the server describing what features a session actually supports. Any omitted keys implicitly indicate the corresponding capability is not supported.
• etc

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WebDriver W3C Specification

With the introduction of WebDriver W3C Specification the following standards were defined:

• WebDriver remote ends must provide an HTTP compliant wire protocol where the endpoints map to different commands.
• Though this standard only defines the remote end protocol, it puts no demands to how local ends should be implemented.
• Local ends are only expected to be compatible to the extent that they can speak the remote end's protocol; no requirements are made upon their exposed user-facing API.

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Commands

The WebDriver protocol is organised into commands. Each HTTP request with a method and template defined in this specification represents a single command, and therefore each command produces a single HTTP response. In response to a command, a remote end will run a series of actions known as remote end steps. These provide the sequences of actions that a remote end takes when it receives a particular command.

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Endpoints

The table of endpoints below lists the method and URI template for each endpoint node command and their current support in ChromeDriver .

Outro

What is the difference between Protocol and Json Wire Protocol