References — bi-07 The CSS Engine

Primary sources first. In-tree Chromium docs beat any external source, including these modules.

Specifications

• CSS Cascading and Inheritance Level 5 — the normative cascade, including @layer. Verified behaviourally in fe-05 (sibling project): layer order beats specificity, and !important inverts layer order.
• Selectors Level 4 — matching semantics and specificity
• CSS Object Model · CSSOM View
• CSS Containment Level 3 — contain, content-visibility, container queries
• CSS Custom Properties — inheritance and computed-value-time resolution
• CSS Values and Units — the value stages: specified → computed → used → actual

Source

• third_party/blink/renderer/core/css/
• css/resolver/style_resolver.cc — cascade resolution
• css/selector_checker.cc — selector matching, right-to-left
• css/invalidation/ — invalidation sets: how Blink avoids re-matching the world
• Style invalidation in Blink — the design document

Talks

• Life of a Pixel — style resolution section
• Rune Lillesveen — Blink style invalidation — search the Chromium blog for invalidation-set posts

Related modules

• fe-05 — CSS architecture & invalidation (sibling project) — measured: content-visibility cut initial layout 98%
• bi-08 — Layout — what computed style feeds
• bi-11 — Scheduling — when style recalculation is allowed to run

When a claim here proves stale, record it in PROGRESS.md section 7.