Concepts

How Distillate turns tagged templates into CSS, in engine order: bind, author, collect, emit.

• The distillery — createDistillery and DistilleryOptions
• Tokens and vars — theme trees, lightDark, cq, contextualVar, vars
• Authoring — modules, handles, css, rule, media, variants
• Reachability collection — StylesCollector
• Naming and output — the four-way matrix
• Ordering and specificity — base rules before at-rules
• Single-copy invariant — one loaded copy of the package

Named variations are a guide: Declare and select variations. Literal values for non-CSS surfaces: Read values outside CSS.