[goroke]

Well, after reading all the suggestions, and thinking about it, I came up with a kludge that may be inelegant, but is the best solution I can think of...

I rewrote my CSS code to:
.smcap
{
text-transform: uppercase;
font-size: 75%; }
.smcap-for_real
{
font-variant: small-caps; }

Then I went back into the pages and changed all my <span class="smcap"> tags so they only wrapped around the letters to be affected. Right now, it appears as though more reading programs support the "text-transform" code than the correct "font-variant:small-caps" code. Then, if the readers should, in the future, not freak out over small-caps, then I can just change one line of code in the CSS and it will do things the proper way. Of course, those devices that don't support the "text-transform" code will see things in normal mixed case (with some font-size reduction on the "small caps"), but I guess you can't have everything...