Ruby is a form of superscript, commonly used in Asian text. The WebKit blog explains it well, with examples:
"A ruby annotation is a short piece of text in smaller font, written directly above or below or – with vertical text – to either side of the base text. It is most often used in East Asian typography in order to provide further information. Most commonly it shows the pronounciation of Chinese characters. Another use case is in text books, to give the foreign spelling of a native word, or vice versa. In literary text or Manga ruby is also sometimes used to specify a variant pronunciation of the underlying characters, to add some depth or twist to the normal understanding."
Of course this is how version numbers are supposed to be used:
* You recommend users to upgrade? Major version
* You improved something without the need for everyone to update? Minor version
* You improved something that you want to get to early adopters? +0.0.1
Unfortunately there is a kind of inflation of version numbers. It seems that almost all products get stuck around 2.3.2. This is unnecessary. Version number is the best tool you have for communicating with your customers / users. Unfortunately it has been hijacked over the years to talk about compatibility. A Major release usually introduces breaking changes and a minor release doesn't. Security updates complicate the matter further, they are often dot-dot releases.
Sometimes I think Google just wants get their version number up as fast as possible, so it doesn't seem like IE is already at 8 while chrome still toddles around in there 3's. (of course this nonsense from a technical standpoint)
