I was probably being a little too literal when I said xpath/id. Something unique like a custom class would be ideal, agreed. I just see that as a different kind of id that I find through an xpath query, which is what I really meant.

To your point, though, the advantage of the class is that other things in your stack probably don't have opinions about what class you tack on, whereas they might want to define your (actual) id for you. IIRC this was how I asked devs to get around dynamic-UI runtime issues where the ids were also auto-generated.