data-test-ids vs user-facing attributes

Question

In this article, and in the official docs of Playwright it is stated that we should prioritize user-facing attributes (like text contents, labels, etc...). On the other hand, I see people using data-test-ids very often. The questions are,

1. which approach is more preferable? Seems like using user-facing attributes is more efficient because we don't have to do extra work adding data-test-ids to our codebase
2. do they have different use cases ?

Any ideas?

Answer 1

This is quite close to an opinion-based question. But I can say that user-facing attributes are go-to option, data-test-ids can complement some scenarios, For instance, where the label is dynamically generated or changes on every run.

For example, I could think of the label showing the order number created. That number will change on every run, so you won't be able to use it. Also, the aria-label should have the order generated. But you could have a data-test-id="order-id" which will be stable.