This seems excessive. I feel for the family in this time of loss, and of course I've seen the outpouring of support on Twitter about this color, but I don't see why it makes any sense to make it a permanent part of CSS. Is there any precedent for other personal stuff like this in the web standards, de facto or otherwise?
Take a step back and ask yourself question: does it matter? I can see where you're coming from; but, honestly: is your life going to be at all impacted by the name of an individual color?
On a case-by-case basis: that's probably fine. (A) It is unlikely to come up too often (lots of people don't have a favorite color), (B) while every named color adds a bit of burden to standards compliance, the bit is so terribly trivial that it's not worth mentioning; it's a single additional line in a lookup table.
There's no precedent issue here to concern ourselves with.
It's the twenty-first century. Assuming we open a precedent that some day grows the named colors to 40,000 entries (which seems like a stretch)... Is maintaining approximately 1.4MB of data in a lookup table really something we are afraid we can't do? I'm pretty sure my computer has forgotten how to count that low.
Is it even a significant burden on the creation of new standards-compliant web browsers? Explain to me how we could go about crafting the development process of a new web browser where populating its table of named colors doesn't reduce to throwing a couple of scripts at a standard normative document to convert that document into the language-du-jour.
Fear of precedent on this question is practically over-stated.
it's a mark of respect, like dedicating a movie to someone. I think the community raising a symbol of support for Meyer in such dark times is much more important than strict naming of CSS colours and I hope you feel the same.
wouldn't it be more thoughtful to remember becca and support her family through a charitable donation or something along those lines rather than trivialize an internet spec?
i feel for the family though and i think it was kind of jeff to reach out to them in a special way today.
EDIT: just so others are aware what the family's wishes are:
"The family requests charitable donations be made in Rebecca’s name to the Philadelphia Ronald McDonald House or the St. Baldrick’s Foundation. They further request that those who attend the services and are comfortable wearing purple do so in honor of Rebecca and her favorite color."
Throughout this whole ordeal Eric has maintained that it is with the support of various communities that he has been able to deal with this tragedy. Eric has done a lot for CSS and the web as a whole, and this request would add zero additional complexity to the specification and only one or two lines of code to the implementation.
It really isn't that big a deal, but there's a lot of us that respect him enough that we'd like to do anything in our power to show our support for him and his family right now, even if it's just to memorialize his daughter's favorite color.
It really isn't that big a deal, but there's a lot of us that respect him enough
It is a really big deal, adding enormous politics and payload to every change going forward: Once you start memorializing people through standards, you are implicitly choosing not to memorialize everyone who doesn't get codified in such a way.
Every city and region has a long backlog of honorarium names for upcoming streets and parks, inevitable discussions and debates, etc. Don't turn standards into that.
This is one of those internet things where everyone looks for some cheap feels by saying "Sure, do it!", maybe sending out a couple of easy tweets. That sort of herd behavior should never influence standards, and it is somewhat ridiculous that this discussion is taking place.
It's already happened. You can argue it's a grandfathered name from color standards predating CSS, but this process right here is how these things happen.
I think the world will survive the occasional honorarium done in this fashion. I would even be willing to wager that the world will survive a great many honoraria done in this fashion, if that's what people want; it's just an entry in a lookup table. There's no meaningful risk here; standards have always been what people can agree upon.
Yes, but that was a child of a US president, also a song, in a musical and a movie, is used on US Naval vessles, and was one of the original X11 names. And it was picked because it is the specific blue of her gown.
My heart goes out to Eric and his family; I practically learned CSS from him. But I don't think that inclusion of what seems to be an arbitrary purple makes sense.
Who needs both though, when the family already asked for very specific things?
It seems to me like "the community" needs to do this much more than the family needs it to be done. I don't see one article on Hacker News notifying folks about the donations that the family mentioned. Kind of backwards, don't you think?
