If it’s one thing I hate it’s loading up a site, click on something and then the layout gets all wonky on me. For the last two years I have read and learned about HTML and CSS validation. The one thing I have learned is that there are people out there that don’t care for it.
What I have learned from reading tutorials, forums and glanced from other (what I consider professionals) developers is that validation is key. I, too, agree that it should be good practice. Better yet: natural. The one issue I have run into as of lately is that WordPress will output an empty element and you get an error in validation. The other thing I noticed is that often times an image doesn’t always get a “alt” attribute. Yes, this can be remedied by making one in the media editing section but what happens when a user doesn’t put one in?
I think that by default WordPress should at least create a sort of container or filler for those rare scenarios. A good example is the gallery shortcode and the captions it creates; or rather it doesn’t. When there is no caption for the image it will still output that element but will be empty. Bad. Rather than creating an empty element just don’t output it. Again: bad.
So, rather than nothing do something. It’s what I kind of did with a quick solution.
$caption = wptexturize( $image->post_excerpt );
if ( !empty($caption) ) {
$output .= "tt< {$captiontag} class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption'>" . $caption . "n";
} else {
$caption = "No caption entered";
$output .= "tt< {$captiontag} class='no-caption'>" . $caption . "n";
}
It works for my needs and what is really nice is that if I forget to put a caption on an image for my gallery posts it will say: No caption entered.
Now I just have to work on REGEX to remove unwanted attributes. The journey continues! 🙂