3 ms·

Sticking to incrementing integer major revision may not be as much fun, it makes ordering much easier. Case in point, a roadrunner hunting a rattlesnake: https

Sticking to incrementing integer major revision may not be as much fun, it makes ordering much easier. Case in point, a roadrunner hunting a rattlesnake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwLspcdm0Bs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwLspcdm0Bs I own some Apple hardware but I couldn't tell you the order of OSX/MacOS releases off the top of my head. It's something only brand enthusiasts memorize, while every school child learns the ordering of integers.

wongarsu 7y ago
To be fair, the IEEE standards are very easy to order, the letters sort the same way excel columns do: a-z, followed by aa-az, then ba-bz, etc. Sure, they skip most of the letters and I'm not sure if the ordering is entirely intentional, but so far it works.
- cesarb 7y ago
  > Sure, they skip most of the letters Actually, they skip just a couple of letters, the ones which can easily be confused with other letters. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/802.11#Standards_and_amendments https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/802.11#Standards_and_amendme... for a full list. And yes, the letters are alocated in order.
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    It's just that they also use letters for clarifications, incremental updates, and in a couple cases tangential committee work, so 802.11 skips so many letters not because they weren't documents but because they were documents that didn't spawn a "new standard" outright. Some of the "in between" letters are used for interesting things, and/or are useful stepping stones in seeing the evolution of the standards that made it to "consumer adoption". (Hence why it was maybe smart of the Wi-Fi Alliance to disambiguate IEEE procedure from marketing names for consumers, but also why they don't seem to be having much more luck with it than say the marketing names of cellular networks, because standards don't evolve "linearly".)

wongarsu 7y ago

To be fair, the IEEE standards are very easy to order, the letters sort the same way excel columns do: a-z, followed by aa-az, then ba-bz, etc. Sure, they skip most of the letters and I'm not sure if the ordering is entirely intentional, but so far it works.

cesarb 7y ago
> Sure, they skip most of the letters Actually, they skip just a couple of letters, the ones which can easily be confused with other letters. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/802.11#Standards_and_amendments https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/802.11#Standards_and_amendme... for a full list. And yes, the letters are alocated in order.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  It's just that they also use letters for clarifications, incremental updates, and in a couple cases tangential committee work, so 802.11 skips so many letters not because they weren't documents but because they were documents that didn't spawn a "new standard" outright. Some of the "in between" letters are used for interesting things, and/or are useful stepping stones in seeing the evolution of the standards that made it to "consumer adoption". (Hence why it was maybe smart of the Wi-Fi Alliance to disambiguate IEEE procedure from marketing names for consumers, but also why they don't seem to be having much more luck with it than say the marketing names of cellular networks, because standards don't evolve "linearly".)