With the somewhat jolting change to deviantART v5 many things have been lost and gained. No more devious desktops, for a start, but now we have those cool "mood icons" to decorate our posts with (as if avatars aren't enough!)

Less superfluous (that's a long word for "fancy") changes have also been made, which have the capability to shake certain users of deviantART to the core.

I am of course speaking of the revolution in deviation viewing. For those of you who are extremely new to this place, or else have exceptionally bad memories, let me fill you in.

Under the dA v4 system there were two ways of viewing a deviation: Preview, which would show you an image no larger than 300 pixels a side; and Full View, which would show the JPEG, PNG, GIF, etc that the use submitted at its actual size.

Now, these two different views were also two completely different URLs. Non members, and members with default settings, would always be met with Preview images whenever they were browsing galleries, etc. But by changing one's preferences you could set it to automatically open things in Full View, and thus save you the hassle of reloading a page at the cost of the initial download time.

Not so any more. As you know, images are always opened in Preview, no matter what your preferences say, whether you are a member or not. On the flip side, the Preview and Full View URLs are the same, and (as I understand it) clicking Full View activates a Javascript action to load the larger image in minimal time. (1 to 3 seconds, in my experience.)

So far, after almost a week of browsing galleries, submissions, and thumbnails, I find the new version to be superior for viewing art in almost every way, except one. And in that one is such a great draw back it very nearly cancels out any positive effect.

The one draw back comes in viewing comic pages, namely a comic that is several pages long and requires you to open many windows to read the whole thing.

Comics in nature have to be at least fairly large in order to be read comfortably, if at all. Therefore when reading comic deviations Full View is essential. As well as Full View being mandatory, immediate Full View is needed equally so the reader spends as little time as possible in between pages waiting for them to load, and in the case of the new v5 system, load and then reload to a viewable size.

Before, when one had two different URLs to work with, this problem was solved simply: when adding "Previous Page" and "Next Page" links to the Artist's Comments one just used the URL that directed the viewer to the Full View. This solved not only the problem of people having to load and reload pages, but it also made it easier for deviants who had the default preferences setting, and for non deviantART members, who might not even know Full View existed otherwise.

I place particular stress on that last group of viewers. As a webcomic co-creator who bases her work right here on deviantART, it was always important to me to have my comic non-deviant friendly, if only to attract more readers and not just those of the deviantART community. It was also two-fold: if non-deviant viewers found out about deviantART through my comic, liked my comic, and became members themselves, then all the better for dA!

This whole situation is jeopardized by the new method of viewing deviations, as well as is the sheer comfort of reading comics page to page. The delay in loading and reloading a new page cuts the flow of the story, the concentration of the reader, and—let's face it—it's just darn annoying.

While I thoroughly enjoy the new method of viewing otherwise, I think the system would greatly benefit from the ability to link directly to full-scale deviations. This is something I imagine would be a difficult and tedious process considering the current set-up, and with the relative minority of webcomics on deviantART, probably not likely to happen.

After all that criticism I am bound to say v5 has some very promising aspects for the webcomic front: namely the default "back" and "forward" buttons which appear above a deviation, letting the viewer easily progress through a deviant's gallery. This lends itself exceptionally well to reading a multi-page comic in someone's gallery. The down side back to this that the buttons only appear on deviations when you open them from someone's gallery, and not when you are linked to them from thumbnails, links, etc.

Still, with a little refining this could be a boon for webcomic creators, as the time spent assembling those "previous" and "next" links is considerable, especially when one is posting 10+ pages at a time.

All in all it appears the bad outweighs the good here, yet whether it affects deviantWEBCOMICS in a negative way has yet to be truly seen. All we can do is wait, and hope more updates come with better tidings.

Also, I want my Devious Desktop back.


*Agent-Elrond has been an active member of deviantART since 2004, specializing in traditionally created fantasy art. She is the co-creator, with *ArofaTamahn, of the deviantART based webcomic The Iron Wizard, which, despite the changes in viewing, is still a fun read.