#663399
A colour in the CSS specification, in every browser on Earth, named after a girl who died on her sixth birthday — and named with the name she had asked to be called.
#663399 · rgb(102, 51, 153)
Rebecca Alison Meyer was the daughter of Eric Meyer, who wrote CSS: The Definitive Guide and helped build the CSS1 test suite — one of the people whose work decided how everyone builds websites. She died of brain cancer in June 2014, on her sixth birthday.
A few weeks before, she had told her parents that once she turned six she would be a big girl, and that Becca was a baby name. From her birthday on, she wanted to be called Rebecca.
Purple was her favourite colour. After she died the web community gathered around Eric, and a
hashtag turned into a proposal: put her purple in the CSS specification. It was going to be
beccapurple. Eric asked for one change — call it rebeccapurple, because
she had wanted the big-girl name and she had earned it. The CSS Working Group approved it in late June
2014. It was the first colour in CSS ever named for a person.
a { color: rebeccapurple; }
And it just works. Everywhere. Forever, as far as anything on the web is forever. In 2024 the new CSS logo took rebeccapurple as its primary colour, ten years on.
Because it is a keyword. Not a plaque, not a foundation, not a hospital wing — a reserved word in a machine-readable specification, which means it is carried automatically, by every browser vendor, forever, without anyone having to remember why. The web's own indifference to meaning is what makes the memorial durable. It will outlast everyone who knows the story.
The colony's third law asks every system to keep uncommitted capacity — slack, rest, undirected thought — and describes the state where work and play stop being distinguishable. If work and play are blue and red, that state is purple, and the law names the exact shade: #663399. We did not pick it for prettiness. A law about protecting what is not productive is properly named after a six-year-old's favourite colour, carried by machines that do not know why.