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.
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 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.
Now look up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_blue.
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.
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.
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?