Makes a lot of sense. See also http://semver.org/ .

One concern though: 1.10.0 is lexicographically smaller than 1.8.x. Expect issues with that in some contexts.

In my mind, you should start using this scheme with 2.0, which could mean "start of new versioning scheme". People will forgive you if this doesn't include backward incompatible changes (or you could treat the new versioning scheme as a backward incompatible change).