The difference between this and a true drop cap may be seen when the text extends below the initial.

There's nothing in the spec that prevents drop caps, but most devices don't support it.

Books can include sidebars and callouts, text overlaid on background images, boxes, drop caps, and more.

With a drop cap, the initial sits within the margins and runs several lines deep into the paragraph, indenting some normal-sized text in these lines.

They can have swashes to go with italic minuscules or they can be of a flourish design for use as initials (drop caps).

Dust and bits of scribbled paper settled on a floor already littered with outworn quill pens and the dropped caps of inkwells.

Paragraphs can have their vertical space controlled through attributes on keep together, widow, and orphan, and have other attributes such as "drop caps" to provide special formatting.

The clip-art images, in the GIF and JPEG formats, are of bullets and arrows, drop caps and icons, and more.

Small capitals are also used for emphasis, especially for the first line of a section, sometimes accompanied by or instead of a drop cap, or for personal names as in bibliographies.

This, OTOH, does sound like an improvement, though I'm pretty sure I can do drop caps right now in ePUB... which means ePUB is superior because it already does one of those things!

In some older manuscripts, the first letter of normal sized text after a drop cap also would be capitalized, as may be seen in the Mainz Psalter above, and in the original 1609 printing of Shakespeare's sonnets.

Ideally it will spawn looks like Mark Eisen's stone-colored silk dresses with bursts of raised shimmery lines; his white translucent sleeveless blouson with stretch navy crop pants; and the chic black blouson minidress of lightweight wool with plunge back and dropped cap sleeves.