HN Reader

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

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...

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.

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

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

GNU Terry Pratchett

Without even judging the overall design (personally I don't mind the simplicity), why on earth do they use such inconsistent fonts? 3 different font sizes (and maybe also mismatching horizontal spacings) for 5 assorted logos??? This is insane...

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?

I didn't expect a logo update to bring tears to my eyes.

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.

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?

It's a nice purple.

I am in a train and I stopped reading because I was crying too much. The fact that the reminder of this story hides in plain sight, in the form of a named CSS color, makes it even more touching for some reason.

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

(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)

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)

>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

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.

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

Haha

This would have been quite funny instead:

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

I think we're stretching the definition of "logos" here. Just sticking text in a square doesn't make it a true logo.

Think of Apple or Nike, those are real logos. The recent logos and icons, including apps like Photoshop's, seem more like we're prioritizing metrics over creativity.

<3

> 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

The bar for a logo has become so low. I don't understand how we reached here and everyone are happy about it.

GNU Rebecca Meyer

I really don’t like these logos that are boxes with text in the lower right. The post cites a “common design language” with other tech but this has to be the most low effort language imaginable.

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

> 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.

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