Learn more: <a href="http://www.zeldman.com/2014/06/10/the-color-purple/" rel="nofollow">http://www.zeldman.com/2014/06/10/the-color-purple/</a><p>In Memory of Rebecca Meyer, help fund childhood cancer research: <a href="https://www.stbaldricks.org/donate/fundraiser/539/2014" rel="nofollow">https://www.stbaldricks.org/donate/fundraiser/539/2014</a>
Perhaps I should have added more context to the title and text as the purpose of the post seems lost to most commenters.<p>Rebecca Meyer is the daughter of Eric Meyer who you may know through through his two decades of work on behalf of web development and web standards. He is the author of Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide and the widely used Reset CSS (<a href="http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/" rel="nofollow">http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/</a>).<p>I would assume that many (if not most) users of Hacker News have benefited from Eric's work.<p>Rebecca died from cancer on Saturday on her 6th birthday. As per the link from Jeffrey Zeldman's blog, there is an effort to get #663399Becca trending today, (June 12th) in a show of solidarity.
For those that don't know, Eric Meyer is an extremely influential programmer, who dedicated a ton of time to improving CSS. Right now my laptop's resting on one of his books. He is as _why was to ruby or dmr was to C. Half of the CSS I've ever written wouldn't work without his contributions.<p>I'm in favor of changing the title bar color temporarily.
I know lots of great people who have died, lots of good charitable efforts, and a few good charitable efforts connected to good people who have died.<p>Can I get HN to put something in their banner every day for a different one?
A nice idea. I would prefer a link to donate to Watsi (any people with the same or similar illnesses?) or to some page covering latest best quality research (and some explanation of that research).
And I can't help but wonder why this gets support but I am routinely downvoted and generally crapped for attempting to talk about what I have done to beat my medical death sentence. It is not intended to piss on this effort. I just honestly do not understand this. If you have genuine concern for other people, why say nice things only after they are dead? Why be so awful to the living? Why shout down someone trying to figure out how to help people with deadly conditions?<p>I honestly do not know where to go anymore to try to talk to people and work on anything. This isn't intended at all as dickish. If people have so much compassion, why not try to support efforts to improve things?
I feel like I'm missing something here.<p>A very young girl died of cancer. That's pretty sad, but I fail to see how it's anymore sad than the hundreds/thousands of people who die of cancer every day. Millions of people will have died of cancer by the end of this year.<p>So we have all these people tweeting this hashtag and coloring their Twitter avatar purple, because Rebecca's favorite color was purple (no non-sequitur there).<p>Why? Why are we mourning the death of this particular individual; what about her plight is so unique?<p>To me it just seems like bandwagoning.<p>Surely there's some aspect of this that I do not understand or of which I am unaware.