Is using the Select element instead of physically doing 'element.click()' bad practice in Test Automation?

html-select nodes must be always handled through Select(webelement) class inducing WebDriverWait for the element_to_be_clickable(). As an example:

• Using Java, cssSelector and selectByVisibleText():

  new Select(new WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(ExpectedConditions.elementToBeClickable(By.cssSelector("selectElementCss")))).selectByVisibleText("visibleText");
  

• Using Python, xpath and select_by_value():

  Select(WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "select_element_xpath")))).select_by_value("option_value")
  

References

You can find a couple of detailed discussions in:

• How to open the option items of a select tag (dropdown) in different tabs/windows?
• How to select an option from a dropdown through Selenium WebDriver
• How to select a drop-down menu value with Selenium using Python?
• Message: Element could not be scrolled into view while trying to click on an option within a dropdown menu through Selenium