From my point of view, this approach will help you to write cleaner code. Also, it will help to maintain the project. For instance, moving a file from the current directory to another will cause fewer problems, because every file uses an absolute path instead of a relative one. Last but not least, it helps you during development.

This is not dumb at all. It is exceedingly common to use aliases. It's not about being lazy, it's about writing portable code.

What seems more problematic is divergence between drivers. For example, capybara-webkit and poltergeist support several of the same things. Let's take resizing the window as an example. In capybara-webkit this is page.driver.resize_window(x, y) and in poltergeist it's page.driver.resize(x, y). This means that if a user wants to switch from one to the other they have to change their code. Now I don't know if selenium does or doesn't support resizing the window, but supposing it doesn't I think there's still a lot of value in the capybara project deciding what the blessed API is, because then all the drivers that support that feature can implement it using the same API, increasing portability.

does not use TCL, Perl, PHP, Python or anything else as an underlying language is written entirely in C has small and simple source code can easily be ported to almost all UNIX-like systems

xdg-open should do the same thing - actually, it will call gnome-open, or kde-open, or whatever, depending on your desktop environment. Thus it's more portable.

Portable... your .name address works with any email or web service. With our automatic forwarding service on third level domains, you can change email accounts, your ISP, or your job without changing your email address. Any mail sent to your .name address arrives in any email box you choose.

Flexibility: your solution can be ported to other UI's, or you can replace your favourite state management form library without affecting your validation engine.