I am new at selenium testing and am writing a bunch of tests for a webpage that relies heavily on javascript user interaction.

At first I wrote a lot of assertions of the style

 If I press button A then
      assert number of visible rows = x,
      assert checkboxes checked are such
      assert title = bar
      .... [20 more]

and so on.

Then I switched to checksumming the HTML using MD5:

 If I press button A then 
     assert md5(html) = 8548bccac94e35d9836f1fec0da8115c.  

And it made my life a whole lot easier...

But is this a bad practice in any way?

example

• I know a HTML file a.htm is working correctly, I copy it as a_test.htm as a testcase I make all checksums using selenium in dictionary.txt ('show_all' : ' 8548bccac94e35d9836f1fec0da8115c, 'hide_all' :3fdec30c2731d22e2516b1cd1261a1e1, 'filter_by_id_click' : 3fdec30c2731d22e2516b1cd1261a1e1) and so on..
• The use cases are done in selenium (driver.findbuttonShowAll.click(), assert(md5(html)==dict['show_all])
• Further development that doesn't brake expected html output is safe, when assertion fails I diff the htmls...

UPDATE : Note that taking this approach can check dynamic behaviour, because of the fact that the md5 strings are build browserspecific from html in memory.