SEMANTIC VERSIONING

what each of the three numbers means, what may follow them, and the order versions stand in

Built as a memo rather than a table: the thing worth hanging it up for reads across the room, with the full reference in smaller type below it.

Three sizes in one archive — from a sheet on the fridge to a poster on the wall.

Formats: A4 · A3 · A2
What you get: Print-ready PDFs, one per size, with every letterform converted to outlines — nothing to install, nothing to shift.
Subject: code · reference · study

The three numbers are read from left to right: the first difference decides. A tail after the hyphen puts the version below the same version without it; a tail after the plus does not affect the order at all. The ladder below is the chain from the specification itself, lowest to highest.

TWO DIFFERENT STRINGS, THE SAME PRECEDENCE

The strings 1.0.0+20130313144700 and 1.0.0+21AF26D3----117B344092BD are different, and yet neither one is higher: build metadata is ignored outright when precedence is determined. Both hold the same precedence as plain 1.0.0.

This is also why versions cannot be ordered as text: of the eight strings in the chain a plain string sort puts 7 in the wrong place — 1.0.0-beta.2, among them, ends up above 1.0.0-beta.11, because "2" outranks "1" as a character.

On the sheet

The three numbers are read from left to right: the first difference decides. A tail after the hyphen puts the version below the same version without it; a tail after the plus does not affect the order at all. The ladder below is the chain from the specification itself, lowest to highest.
Colour carries meaning, but meaning never rests on colour alone — the sheet reads in black and white.
Nothing about how it was made: the sheet carries only what the reader needs.

Printing

Three sizes in the archive: A4 — 210×297 mm, A3 — 297×420 mm, A2 — 420×594 mm.
All text is converted to outlines. No fonts to install, and nothing shifts on another machine.
White background and sparing fills — it prints on a home printer without draining the cartridge.
Margins of at least 10 mm: a home printer cannot print to the edge.
No stroke thinner than 0.3 mm, so nothing disappears in print.

Why the numbers can be trusted. Every countable number here is computed from data rather than typed in, and the sheet must pass 5 independent checks before it is allowed to build — how many items there are, the order they come in, and the claim in the highlighted box itself. If one fails, there is no file.

SEMANTIC VERSIONING

TWO DIFFERENT STRINGS, THE SAME PRECEDENCE

On the sheet

Printing

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