[gsnedders]

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.

[DougBTX]

The implementation in the article still used hard-coded lengths, perhaps this could have been fixed without the extra markup after all.