Adding 'rebeccapurple' color to CSS Color Level 4 (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Adding 'rebeccapurple' color to CSS Color Level 4 (2014)

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95 pointsmendelk33 comments

Longer conversation on this from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7924677

- Eric Meyer wrote about it: http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/06/19/rebeccapurple/

The purple is actually quite vibrant: http://www.color-hex.com/color/663399

Eric's writings about his daughter, his family, himself through it all, are intense to read through. Glad the community was able and willing to push this through so quickly as a sign of respect to her.

I understand the arguments against this, but I don't think I've ever met a web developer that actually still uses the color names. I saw it often in 2007 or so, but not at all anymore. So I'm left not really caring about a slippery slope of names appearing in a list of things nobody uses.

And I should say that despite color names not really being used, it's still a very nice gesture.

They are a nice transitional crutch for students just getting started. I teach html, css, and javascript to 13 year olds using Adobe Brackets. The color name code completion is a big assist early on when introducing the basics of CSS before getting into the more daunting hex codes or RGBA values.

Agreed. That's the last time that I used them. Then I branched into #ffffff, #000000, learned how the shorthand hex codes worked, etc. They don't really have a place in a professional environment though, so adding a new on as a tribute doesn't really harm anything at all, imo.

The color list is already ridiculously large anyway -- early web browsers allowed color names to be used from the X11 "rgb.txt" [1], bringing us colors like "papayawhip", "firebrick", and (as mentioned below) "peru". So it's not as though adding one more color is some sort of huge burden.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X11_color_names

For those unaware of Eric Meyer's story, I implore you to listen to Shop Talk Show's interview with him about the general topic of "designing for crisis": http://shoptalkshow.com/episodes/161-with-eric-meyer/

This topic I feel would be dear to many HN readers, as his experience really gets at the heart of design, technology, and the human experience. It raises the question of how important design really is in those key moments of crisis and tragedy, and how we still have a long way to go in our society to optimize for the 5% of experiences that fall outside of "the happy path" (double entendre).

Hearts out to Mr. Meyer for his loss.

You can check to see if your browser has the color:

http://output.jsbin.com/derewavufu/1

Look for purple background. Firefox 38 and Chrome 42 have it.

Safari 8.0.6 too

IE11 and Opera 29 have it.

Out of curiosity: Are there any other semantically unrelated color names in the spec?

aliceblue, though that was a pre-existing color.

Here's a full list:

http://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/color.html

Thanks! (Ecaron's parent comment to an older HN thread also had some comments that named a few)

`dodgerblue` and `aliceblue` are pretty damning...I don't see much reason rebeccapurple shouldn't be added at that point. I guess there's the argument of not personalizing the content more than it already is.

I guess there's the argument of not personalizing the content more than it already is.

There's also the argument of how much utility all these colour names actually have - if you did a survey of the colours specified in the CSS of all sites on the Internet, I bet a huge proportion of the ones that use colour names are the common ones like "black", "white", "red", "green", etc.; and the rest are specified in hex. All these other seldom-used names just take up space in every single piece of software that wants to claim compliance with CSS4 standard.

Especially with the development of CSS preprocessors, it feels to me like hex colours would suffice; and perhaps the primary and secondary colours.

I see an "aliceblue". No idea if there is a history behind it.

http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-color/#named-colors

AliceBlue, named for Roosevelt's daughter that started the color trend in fashion.

There's also Peru, but I'm not sure what that's about.

I'd definitely be interested to learn the story behind `peru` since it doesn't seem to be related to the most obvious choice (the flag(s))

Not as cool as cosmic latte. :)

As a peruvian, that brown color can only mean two things; the beautiful color of the Andes, or the shitty state of peruvian politics. Either way, I am cool with it.

OK, jokes on the side, although I really don't know for sure the source, I would say that brown color is very typical in Peru.

- You can see it in the Andes mountains: http://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/8000/8924/...

http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGS/Sh...

- You can see it in the clay that is used for rooftops: http://curanderos.ru/peru/18374000.jpg

- The color of the salt mines: http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/maras-salt-mines-peruvian-and...

- In the huge amount of peruvian clay pottery: https://www.google.com/search?q=peruvian+andes&espv=2&biw=12...

* Un the die for the textiles: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/63/9b/34/639b34468...

* Even in natural disasters when the river flows out ("huaycos") and destroys roads: http://cde.publimetro.e3.pe/ima/0/0/0/1/7/17391.jpg

Surprised there is a peruvian brown - but it makes sense to me :)

Peru was introduced to CSS from its status as an X11 color.

It originated as a color name ("Peruvian Brown") in the 1920's, though I'd be interested in seeing how that happened.

I asked on English stack exchange.

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/247129/why-is-per...

I'm not sure my question is good enough to stay open, but we'll see.

Thanks Dan! Reading with eager anticipation (really!)

Not semantically unrelated, but my personal favorite is "tomato"

I just want to point to a post by Eric which essentially captures what it's like to hear that a loved one is chronically sick.

http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2013/08/19/77-hours/

As to the question of if it should be done?

Normally I'm one to optimize, so much so that premature optimization is something I must stand vigilant for. And I do understand how adding names to a standard adds ever so slight a bloat. And I understand there are only ~4K shorthand hex colors to assign names to.

But honestly I don't have a problem with this. I'm having a hard time explaining why, but the simplistic way to express it is by saying it is art. Part of the CSS specification has now impacted me emotionally on a deeper level than most art I've seen, especially when you read why it is rebeccapurple and not beccapurple.

No, it isn't perfectly optimized. But there is value in trading spartan utility for beauty, especially when the cost is so low.

Even though I cannot articulate why, given this knowledge I now care more about the CSS sepcifications.

Does anyone know why #663399 was chosen in particular? I did some quick searching but couldn't find much.

As far as I can find, this was the original suggestion, which doesn't specify why it was that particular one.

http://discourse.specifiction.org/t/name-663399-becca-purple...

The CSS colors seem like a bad idea to me. Apart from the basic ones it's pretty hard to set them into relation. I don't know the difference between brown and saddlebrown without looking. They also add to code-bloat without really adding a functionality.

One way around the implied slippery slope is to impose a time limit: If anyone still wants this in after twenty years, it goes in, but not before.

Yes, it's arbitrary. These are color names. They're inherently arbitrary. If there's no limit, our list of CSS colors will become a list of dead people, which is nice and all but isn't useful for the task of assigning human-meaningful names to points on the color spectrum. Let's see, was this dead kid bluer or redder than that dead kid...

there is a limit of 16^6 24 bit colors

So if this becomes a thing, there are people who will be left out, simply because either the community arbitrarily says "No" just like it arbitrarily said "Yes" in the past, or because there's no more room in the spec. Either way is a recipe for bad blood.

"Rough consensus and running code" is a powerful methodology for low-overhead development right up until it means everyone gets all emotional over what a color is named and whether there are too many memorials in something originally designed to be simple and useful. Say what you will about bureaucracy, it at least enforces a certain emotional distance when people are bound by rules and can legitimately say that their refusal is nothing personal.

"Either way is a recipe for bad blood."

In this case, that sounds like an attempt at premature social optimization.

It's a nice gesture. If it becomes a problem we'll deal with it.

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