My point is that it's odd to praise them for having gone so far and spent so much time on the wrapper when they haven't gotten the basics right, like dropcaps.

My point is that it's odd to praise them for having gone so far and spent so much time on the wrapper when they haven't gotten the basics right, like dropcaps. Dropcaps are a little fiddly to get right, but they are not that hard. Even my website has correctly-implemented dropcaps, and there are no fulltime web devs maintaining it, shall we say. If you've piled on a mountain of crap in the name of typography and you can't even get dropcaps right, then you aren't making a pretty wrapper (because a pretty wrapper is at least pretty) - you're just making a mountain of crap. The NYer's website, IMO, is as ugly as their reporting is good.