CSS gets a new logo and it uses the color `rebeccapurple`

[langsoul-com]

> The color was originally going to be called beccapurple, but Meyer asked that it instead be named rebeccapurple, as his daughter had wanted to be called Rebecca once she had turned six. She had said that Becca was a "baby name," and that once she had turned six, she wanted to be called Rebecca. As Eric Meyer put it, "She made it to six. For almost twelve hours, she was six. So Rebecca it is and must be."

Wasn't expecting tears over a colour

[toxican]

I'm sobbing like a baby while my 5yo twins are watching TV nearby. That is such a 5-going-on-6 decision to make, which just drives the whole thing home for me and I can't handle it right now.

I've always loved the existence of "rebeccapurple", but I somehow missed that part of the story. Her color being immortalized in the CSS logo (even if it changes years from now) is so incredibly beautiful to me.

[davrosthedalek]

The last two sentences of that quote hit me so hard.

[jvm___]

..in 2014 in honor of Eric Meyer's daughter, Rebecca, who passed away at the age of six on her birthday from brain cancer.

[xelamonster]

Yeah wow, I love that this is forever encoded into the standard now. A lovely tribute. It's always been one of the few CSS default colors I actually like too (alongside "cornflowerblue").

[empathy_m]

Eric Meyer's posts about his daughter's illness, and the family's lifelong process of grieving afterward, are heartbreaking. It's arresting, gripping writing. It's wonderful and awful. Hug your loved ones tight. https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/category/personal/rebecca...

[ericwood]

Thank you for linking this. I read bits and pieces of this as it was happening but it never fully registered for me at 24. I'm sitting here 10 years later at 34 having lost our son at 23 weeks. His due date was this past week. It's affected me in ways that still surprise, befuddle, and sometimes scare me. I cannot even begin to fathom what he's been through; the most recent blog post has me in tears.

I have really strong memories of learning HTML, CSS, and javascript in high school, and spending time in the school library picking apart css/edge. It felt like the dawn of a new era, I was in awe of the things I saw there. I built more than a few sites trying to get my head around the complexispiral demo, and spent countless hours diving into resources I found there (like A List Apart! I will never forget the suckerfish drop-downs). This is one of the few moments I have such vivid memories of that were directly responsible me for pursuing computer engineering and ultimately going so far into UI/UX and the web. I've never written it out this explicitly but: thank you for everything, Eric.

[arrowsmith]

Ouch. As a father, that was a gutpunch. Dark, haunting, dripping with grief and pain, but beautifully written and very haunting.

I can’t imagine anything worse than what that guy has been through.

I’m holding my sleeping baby as I write this and I just hugged him even tighter. Thanks for sharing.

[czhu12]

Having never had children myself, his writing moved me in a way that I struggle to comprehend. I spent my 2 hour commute reading through all of his writing on his time, and subsequent grief of his daughter, starting here: https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/06/18/welcome-2/

I found this piece particularly moving, and brought me to tears:

https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/06/10/so-many-nevers...

[29athrowaway]

Those posts are definitely not for everyone. It is a deep dive into the emotions of a grieving father for over a decade.

I really hope that man can find peace.

[whatever1]

How can the game be so unfair for some? People don’t deserve this.

[kaelig]

"wonderful and awful" is such a brilliant way to capture this. Thank you

[shahzaibmushtaq]

I will never ever forget this color name and the story behind it for the rest of my life.

[layer8]

I had read about it in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34186932 (or some other earlier HN submission) and had since forgotten it. I wouldn’t be surprised to forget about it again.

[graypegg]

It’ll be interesting to see where we end up using this. I don’t honestly see the CSS3 shield this is meant to replace very often anymore.

Probably the place where it’ll be seen the most is in IDE file trees, where I’m a bit worried it’ll just look like a little purple blob

[kijin]

File Browser / Finder maybe, but the text inside the boxes are too small for IDE file trees.

VS Code shows "JS" in yellow text without the box, against a dark background. CSS is just a blue hash symbol. Maybe they'll change the color to rebeccapurple, but I don't think there's room for a box around the symbol.

[otteromkram]

> Update 22 Jun 14: the proposal was approved by the CSS WG and added to the CSS4 Colors module. Patches to web browsers have already happened in nightly builds. (I’m just now catching up on this after the unexpected death of Kat’s father early Saturday morning.)

Mr. Meyer certainly had a rough 2014.

Kudos to him and all his CSS contributions over the years. I hope he has been able to find some solace since then.

[aryonoco]

I would say he hasn't, considering a few months ago he wrote "A Decade Later, A Decade Lost" https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2024/06/07/a-decade-later...

And I can't blame him. They say no parent should see their child die, and that's certainly true; but especially no parent should see their 6 year old child die of brain cancer. Humans are not built to withstand that.

[lenkite]

Like Rebecca, I also like #639 - its a wonderful color. Looks great on a web-site as a solid color that you can built a palette from and the hex code is simplicity to remember. I really wish CSS had more color names - would have been great to have named, Pantone colors or another named system.

[niutech]

HTML/CSS has a lot of color names: https://htmlcolorcodes.com/color-names/

[kmoser]

Pantone colors as CSS variables: https://github.com/Margaret2/pantone-colors/blob/master/pant...

[miiiiiike]

Eric’s CSS: The Definitive Guide really is the only way to learn CSS. https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/css-the-definitive/9781...

[bdcravens]

It's great that Rebecca's name will be find its ways across codebases for as long as we are using named aliases for colors in HTML/CSS.

It's nowhere near the significance of her's and Eric's story, but the piece of land where my grandfather built his home in the 1940s or 1950s has his name on it: the "Paul D. Cravens Addition". Even though that home is long since gone (in a fire) and the land is owned by someone else, every deed and building permit henceforth has his name attached it.

[npteljes]

I used rebeccapurple a lot as well, unknowing of the touching story behind it. I coded CSS by hand (back in like 2010), and for placeholders, I used the simple colors I knew, like "green" or "blue". And "red", of course, too. But when typing "re" for "red", I noticed that it autocompletes to "rebeccapurple", which amused me, since I thought it's kind of a nonsense to have a color named like that. Over time, I used it a lot, and it became a kind of a favorite of mine.

[watusername]

For the record, rebeccapurple was ratified in June 2014 [0] and was added to mainstream browsers late that year [1]. I imagine it wouldn't be "web-safe" until 2015/2016 at the earliest.

(Not doubting your anecdote - Just felt like doing some sleuthing on the timeline)

[0] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2014Jun/0312.... [1] https://caniuse.com/css-rebeccapurple (use "Date Relative")

[qark]

Is there any link that explains why this particular shade of purple was chosen to represent Rebecca?

[felbane]

Purple was her favorite color. #639 is shorthand for about the purplest purple you can make with RGB. Jeff Zeldman proposed the color name on Twitter and in a blog post shortly after she died, and it understandably caught on.

[voat]

For some reason, I was under the impression that the blue shield was the css logo.

But after looking at it, I realized that it was just for CSS 3 and I'm not sure if it was even official?

[dang]

Related. Others?

Adding 'rebeccapurple' color to CSS Color Level 4 (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34186932 - Dec 2022 (1 comment)

Adding 'rebeccapurple' color to CSS Color Level 4 (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9565503 - May 2015 (33 comments)

Adding 'rebeccapurple' color to CSS Color Level 4 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7924677 - June 2014 (25 comments)

In memory of Rebecca Alison Meyer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7863890 - June 2014 (68 comments)

[brianzelip]

An official logo for CSS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42124786 - November 2024

[pino82]

Why does it include TS? I would never have called it a 'web technology'. A lot of people use it in their tech stack, but fortunately, the browser does not even understand it, right?

[asddubs]

>The design follows the design language of the logos of other web technologies like JavaScript, TypeScript, and WebAssembly.

and yet it's 5 logos with 3 different font sizes and at least 3 different font faces

3 of which are perfect rectangles, and 2 of which are slight variations on rectangles

i guess it perfectly represents the ecosystem, no notes

[Maken]

To fully represent HTML, they should be displayed with sightly different fonts and kerning in each operating system.

[globalise83]

This is the evolution of "Design by committee" to "Design by 3 committees"

[swayvil]

It's a nice purple.

[usbsea]

A simple one too - it would be on a 216 colour pallete using six values for each of R, G and B.

R = 1/5

G = 2/5

B = 3/5

Edit: of course that makes sense it is probably a "web safe" one

[kibwen]

For your name to recited by the machines for all eternity is a form of immortality.

GNU Terry Pratchett

[niutech]

Like Linus Torvalds' Linux or Phil Katz' PKZIP.

[OrangeMusic]

Huh?

[biesnecker]

I don’t click on HN articles expecting to cry, but here we are.

[laserstrahl]

https://github.com/vic/rebecca-theme I thought it derrives from this.

Haha

[zahlman]

(Touching story. Now I feel bad about making the joke (?), but I will anyway.)

Was I the only one going in thinking that this would result in a slightly off-green colour (RGB(14, 202, 0)) instead?

(Ref. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8318911)

[gedy]

This would have been quite funny instead:

https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.1851735303.3881/flat,750x,07...