Selenium WebDriver development challenges

WebDriver is a W3C standard describing API for browser automation and a tool which implements this standard. Alexey has been participating in developing this tool since 2011. In this talk, he'll cover several challenges which they encountered while writing the tool code and drawing up the text of the standard and how they dealt with these challenges with varying degrees of success.

Why the tool API does have "check element visibility" feature while the standard doesn't? Is there any way to know that the element is clickable without clicking on it? Why is it so hard to get the text of the element? Why, when requesting a new session initialization, the same data get transmitted in triplicate? Come to learn more about these and other pitfalls Alexey and his colleagues have experienced.