I wasn't close to the story, but I'll try to summarize, as nobody else has posted a reply.
Eric Meyer was very active in the html standards community and blogged and promoted html css and firefox extensively, wrote books, etc, and was very well known in the community, perhaps the most well known.
At some point his five year old daughter was found to have a terminal illness. He wrote some wrenching blog posts about his struggle knowing she was soon to die, trying to help maintain her innocence of that fact as she continued to get worse, to enjoy the remaining days without getting overwhelmed with grief. Then she died.
In honor of Eric's loss and in recognition of his efforts to promote modern web design, they added a name to the css spec of his daughter's favorite color.
I honestly wonder if it wasn’t also influenced at least a tiny bit by people wanting a decent purple named colour. I know it had always grated with me that pretty much all the other colours were fairly well-represented, but there just wasn’t a good purple, and I regularly use rebeccapurple as a temporary colour, because of its value, not its history.
(I’m not suggesting this was a conscious factor in any way, but at the same time it wouldn’t surprise me if in an alternate history where Becca’s favourite colour was green or blue that the entire thing wouldn’t have come to fruition.)
