V5 and beyond

I guess the site is already full of ramblings about V5, but I think I'll still throw in my thoughts.

The new layout is good. All of the most horrifying features of the old one are gone, though some of the pages (deviation submission, devwatch, updating the journal) still look and feel like they used to in the past. Navigation is a lot simpler, and the improved zoom function of the deviation pages works flawlessly. If you happen to use Firefox 1.5 or Internet Explorer 6, that is.

The site is almost unusable in Opera 9, and awful in Internet Explorer 7 (still in beta, though). To a huge site like this, good browser compatibility should be a very important issue. Now there are bugs all over the place. Seeing that only the most central parts of the site were changed, I simply can't understand why things are the way they are. I myself am quite happy with the update as I'm a Firefox user, but I'm sure a lot of people aren't.

The new categorization is also quite weird, if not outright bad. Some of the main categories are technique based, some of them are style based, and some of them are application based. I simply can't understand the logic of that. Why not separate categorization of style and technique altogether? The two really aren't that closely related. I bet it would make everything easier in the long run too. Converting all those old 24 000 000+ deviations to the new system would surely be somewhat of a programming task, but it shouldn't stand in the way of real progress.

In other news, I'd like to thank all the people on #digitalmedia for the series of competitions that were held during the birthday. Doing themed one-hour pictures was tons of fun, and I'm already looking forward to the next similar event. DMchat should have the complete results up quite soon.