Did you know the browser you’re reading this on contains a profoundly moving story of love and loss within its code? No? Then read on. If you’ve ever done any kind of HTML, you know that you can specify colors either by their red green blue (RGB) hex values (e.g., #FF0000) is red, or by using a predefined named color that the browser knows, e.g., “red”. So, if I said: color: red, the browser has a mapping between “red” and FF0000. There are over 100 other named colors, kind of like a box of crayons. And just like a box of crayons, you start running out of color names after using up the obvious ones like red, green, orange, and so on. I’ve always laughed at some of the more exotic names like “papaywhip” and “burlywood.” One day, a couple years ago when I was looking at the color list, a named color popped up that I had never seen before: “RebeccaPurple” in hex: #663399. I was familiar with “AliceBlue” which was a shade of blue named after Alice Roosevelt, but who was Rebecca?
A love story, in code
A love story, in code
A love story, in code
Did you know the browser you’re reading this on contains a profoundly moving story of love and loss within its code? No? Then read on. If you’ve ever done any kind of HTML, you know that you can specify colors either by their red green blue (RGB) hex values (e.g., #FF0000) is red, or by using a predefined named color that the browser knows, e.g., “red”. So, if I said: color: red, the browser has a mapping between “red” and FF0000. There are over 100 other named colors, kind of like a box of crayons. And just like a box of crayons, you start running out of color names after using up the obvious ones like red, green, orange, and so on. I’ve always laughed at some of the more exotic names like “papaywhip” and “burlywood.” One day, a couple years ago when I was looking at the color list, a named color popped up that I had never seen before: “RebeccaPurple” in hex: #663399. I was familiar with “AliceBlue” which was a shade of blue named after Alice Roosevelt, but who was Rebecca?