Currently, setting a style on the <html> element to "inherit" gives it a computed value inherited from its DOM ancestor, the document node.
The computed style of the document is determined by StyleResolver::styleForDocument but not directly exposed to CSS (no selector matches the document and you cannot pass it to getComputedStyle).
Allowing styles to inherit from the document node leads to bugs like http://crbug.com/586759 and http://crbug.com/590818 .
In the review thread of http://crrev.com/1734273002 it is suggested that the <html> element inherit styles from the default values as produced by StyleResolver::initialStyleForElement(), instead of inheriting them from the document node.
Comment 1 by cbiesin...@chromium.org
, Jul 6 2016