REBECCA MEYER was taken too soon, on her sixth birthday. Having survived rounds of treatment for cancer, the girl, one of Kathryn and Eric Meyer's three children, finally succumbed. She will be remembered through the colourful lifeblood of the web. The death of a child is always a tragedy, and people of good will try to make sense of it through whatever means they have. Her father, Mr Meyer, is beloved among web design and development circles both for his expertise with the arcana of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) used for webpage layout and formatting and for the generosity, clarity and goodwill with which he shares what he knows. He has also been a force for common standards, working to keep CSS characteristics in sync across browsers made by different firms, which makes the job of designers and programmers much easier. (Mr Meyer is a friend of your correspondent's as well.)

Mr Meyer has an engaged online presence. He was the one, for instance, to raise a hue and cry when a fellow web standards guru abruptly erased his presence across all websites. (Said person was fine, just tired of living in public.) Rebecca's diagnosis, treatment, struggle and passing played out through social media as Mr Meyer turned to his broader community for moral support for him and his family.

Many of the Meyers' friends, acquaintances, colleagues and well-wishers struggled to find any appropriate means to celebrate Rebecca's short life. The couple suggested two charities for donations in her name, and for those attending the memorial in person to wear the colour purple, her favourite. Few among that larger group had met Rebecca or could attend the ceremony.

Jeffrey Zeldman, a close chum and colleague of Mr Meyer, offered a broader suggestion to the extended community of the internet. The day of the memorial, June 12th, he proposed those who wanted to commemorate her and show the family their support use the hashtag #663399Becca; the number represents the hexadecimal (base 16) value to specify a particular shade of the colour purple in the web palette. It is pictured above.

On June 12th, purple abounded. The hashtag flitted about, but people on Twitter and Facebook also updated their avatars to be a solid field or purple hued, your correspondent included. Some heavily trafficked websites among the technical, design and early internet crowds, such as Daring Fireball and Kottke.org, changed backgrounds or other details to purple for the day.

But there was one more way to keep her memory alive. Web standards support specifying colour values in the full range that can be expressed as a triad of three numbers, ranging from 0 to 255 in decimal or 00 to FF in hex. But they also include a small number of human-readable colour names, such as "palegoldenrod" or "crimson".

Some of the Meyers' friends and colleagues suggested that in that spirit, the colour #663399 be given the name "beccapurple." Mr Meyer, noting the honour, asked that if the name were adopted, it should be "rebeccapurple". Weeks before her death, she said she would give up the "baby name" of Becca and become Rebecca on her sixth birthday. She lived twelve hours with that new name. The proposal sped through the requisite groups and was approved on June 21st. The appropriate draft document was updated immediately. Committee representatives from Mozilla, Apple, Google and Microsoft have already agreed to adopt the name in their browsers.

In the future, should a designer wish to choose that particular hue, the number #663399 will always suffice. But stating the value by Ms Meyer's full name will work as well. Not every child or person who is gone too soon can be remembered this way, but for Rebecca, it seems appropriate. Her memory is preserved not in amber, but in the colour rebeccapurple.