Setting the :first-letter pseudo-element to be floating doesn't seem to work in nglayout. This makes it impossible to create drop-caps. If you decide to support this, I suggest you take advantage of the liberties described in CSS2, section 5.12.2: "In order to achieve traditional drop caps formatting, user agents may approximate font sizes, for example to align baselines. Also, the glyph outline may be taken into account when formatting." The properties which apply to :first-letter pseudo-elements are listed in section 2.4 of CSS1. Section (2) of the test page gives an example.

Bug 579 is the placeholder for all of the :first-letter issues. First letter now works better (inline elements can now contribute, not just immediate text). However, float and background behaviours are not yet implemented. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 579 ***

Marking Verified as a dup.