Status: law — the small-surfaces chapter is normative in docs/chapters/small-surfaces.md (ratified v1). It is the thinnest of the three ratified chapters, and it says so; its gaps are named, not papered over.

carries unchanged. the token core; the accent law; furniture, applied hardest here (a small surface has no spare room for it); vector first; the performance law (an ambient surface that costs frames fails it outright); silence during fullscreen applications and games.

rules with witnesses (law).

• the tray icon is an object, not a launcher: badged with its state (glyph plus a state notch), and its popover is the icon unfolded (fused anchor, one material across the join).
• resting state is nearly nothing plus one owned datum. state decays: banner to mark to nothing. off means gone, for every modular tool on the surface.
• glance, not inventory: a small surface declares a glance budget (top item plus a peek, overflow as a count) and keeps it.
• small-scale geometry: below roughly 150px, flat geometry and real type carry; illustration reads as mud and is dropped.
• brightness is the state variable inside depictions; never blur.
• a cheatsheet mode is the on-demand home for the full legend — teaching lives there, not rented as permanent chrome.

named gaps in this chapter. the hover-open delay default for tray-class surfaces is unset (a field witness says it must be adjustable; the default value is not chosen); watch-class and phone-ambient surfaces have principles named but no worked anatomy; the notch grammar has one product family as witness, and a second surface would harden it considerably.

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Canonical chapter: docs/chapters/small-surfaces.md; map and spine in §13 of the design language document.