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On a job website I wondered if I could use CSS selectors to get to the important stuff. I think a lot of people have had those thoughts, and the website knew. While the page might have some repeatable structure, the ids and classes were just randomly generated. Also, After you open the job listing, they too were all different because the job poster had the ability to set up their own mini html that was embedded in the page.

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It is entirely possible that they did this to prevent scraping, but it is also possible it isn't intentional like that - for example, if you use the 'styled components' react library, it ends up spitting out a ton of class names that are basically gibberish, not intentionally.

That's been my experience too, as well as encountering a lot of legacy HTML markup without many useful class/id attributes. The random values are likely result of modern build tools like the one you mention, but there's also the growing popularity of utility-first CSS frameworks like Tailwind which also make finding useful selectors difficult.

In these situations it might be best to rely on position of elements and other CSS selectors rather than attribute values. Unfortunately the :nth-child and :nth-of-type selectors still trip many people up. In Feed Creator we borrowed from XPath to make selecting by position a little easier. We've got a comparison here: https://help.fivefilters.org/feed-creator/css-selectors.html...

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