Introducing CaptionKiller, because WordPress captions are bad
After some consideration I’ve come to the conclusion that WordPress’ new image captioning feature, introduced in WordPress 2.6, is bad. Not that I have anything against image captions in general, but I believe that design and implementation of this feature in WordPress 2.6 (and for a lack of change also in 2.6.1) are flawed and potentially harmful. Here’s what’s wrong with it:
1. There’s no way to turn it off
Once you’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.6, the new image captioning feature is turned on by default. This means that WordPress will suddenly create different markup when you insert an image in one of your posts and it’s rather unlikely that your theme will handle these unforeseeable changes gracefully. Things will look weird and you’ll have to adapt your theme’s CSS to account for this change. There’s really no way to avoid this and I personally consider this kind of upgrade policy shortsighted, disrespectful and offensive.
2. It discourages people from adding alternative descriptions to their images
Well, that last sentence in the previous paragraph is actually not entirely true. There is a way to avoid this weird, potentially theme-breaking new feature: if you don’t specify alt-text (an alternative description)Â for an image, WordPress will insert your image the old-fashioned way, without captions and all those weird divs that come with them. That’s why I called this new feature potentially harmful in the beginning of this post: because it might encourage people to avoid alt-text for images altogether, just so their CMS won’t fuck around with their site-design and mark-up. I guess we can all agree that discouraging people from adding alternative descriptions to their images is a very bad thing, for accessibility, meta-data-related and possibly other reasons I can’t think of right now.
WordPress’ moronic captioning behavior is certainly related to their design decision to just use alt-text descriptions for image captions and I could probably rant on how I think an image caption and a text description are not necessarily the same thing (although often they are, admittedly), but I guess that’s all debatable and up to one’s personal preference, so I’ll leave it at that.
However, the lack of an easily accessible user setting to turn the new captioning feature off is undeniably a big oversight, and I therefore decided to do something about it. After an hour of research and 1 minute of coding I ended up with the following, dead-simple plugin: WordPress CaptionKiller. It’s an astounding 4 lines of code and I thorougly hope it won’t be needed anymore come WordPress 2.6.2, but in the meantime there might be some who find this useful. Please note: this plugin only works with WordPress 2.6.1. If you’re still using WordPress 2.6 and want to turn off captioning, I would suggest reading this or this, though I haven’t tried these methods myself.
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