Currently developing an extension for Gmail that inserts a couple of buttons, using jquery.
I’m relying on the canvas_frameiframe and a couple of more div referrenced with their class names, not by their ids.
How reliable is this? How frequent does Gmail gets their class names changed?
As a side note, I thought of an small javascript file to be pulled from a server constantly, that refreshes class names in case Gmail changes them. I don’t like this approach (to change the code) since, this is a security extension, and this will probably request more permissions to the user.
As this is pretty much a hack, there is no guarantee when Google might change the underlying HTML structure.
This reminds me of Remember The Milk for Gmail as Browser Add-on. They did the add-on not via Gmail API but by pretty much hacking the Gmail HTML. It breaks really frequently, due to Google “upgrading” Gmail.
To give you an idea how often Gmail is upgraded, take a look at the list of Gmail versions that RTM team is keeping track of. Gmail is basically updated every few days!
Kudos to the RTM engineers though, they usually fix their add-on to support the latest Gmail relatively quickly whenever it breaks.
That being said, in short, there is no telling how fast
<div id="canvas_frame">might change, but at least now you have an idea how fast Gmail is changing.