Breaks normal in-browser search, at least for me. Since dropcap is an established layout element, maybe it should be a style property instead, so that the browser can render it correctly and also allow for search.
I don't think it needs a new style. [Edit: I'm wrong, see reply below]. There is a CSS pseudo-element ::first-letter, which you can format and align as you wish. In the article they try to use this, but run afoul of the fact that different rendering engines disagree on how exactly it should be converted into a (CSS) box. In my experience you can get a lot further without having to use spans, but I also couldn't make it perfect.
I suspect it's just ultra low priority for folks making rendering engines. It doesn't make a lot of sense for web typography, and to me looks just downright daft if you're not going to pull in and accentuate the start of the first line, or if you're going to separate your paragraphs with blank lines. My personal feelings only of course, but it feels like a bastardisation between different eras of typography.
Can you say more what you mean by 'doesn't suffice'? There are certainly some forms of typographic initial I know it can't do. But if it worked consistently, it would be sufficient to achieve the effect that the article is attempting, wouldn't it?
Thanks for the link. I had no idea it was an active proposal.
Without knowledge of the fonts used, you can't get both ascender line and baseline aligned with respective lines of content, which is the traditional way of doing drop caps.
Sure, with web fonts and assumptions that the font always successfully loads and covers all graphemes in the text you can hardcode lengths to achieve proper alignment, but that's still a bit fragile.
I suspect it's just ultra low priority for folks making rendering engines. It doesn't make a lot of sense for web typography, and to me looks just downright daft if you're not going to pull in and accentuate the start of the first line, or if you're going to separate your paragraphs with blank lines. My personal feelings only of course, but it feels like a bastardisation between different eras of typography.