Need help to understand version naming

Recently we've voted for a RFC http://pear.php.net/pepr/pepr-proposal-show.php?id=65 what was accepted but there are still some details that are still unclear. I don't want to raise again a flame war, but i want to understand what we should do, in case of alpha and beta versions of packages. html_css-0.4.0 was refused because the beta1 suffix was missing. In same time, packages below were releases accepted like that :

name                       state

services_ebay-0.8.0alpha alpha search_mnogosearch-0.1.0 alpha

net_dnsbl-0.5.4            beta
soap-0.8.1                 beta

sometimes we found the state as suffix, sometimes not What are the common scheme, and the differences between these alpha and beta versions of these packages. I'll be very glad to understand, and i think i'm not alone ! Laurent