Converting a string to small-caps?

The CSS font-variant: small-caps doesn't render as expected in most
browsers( ie. in IE 5.x it renders all the characters as upper-case, and
NN4.x doesn't format it at all). So I'm trying to write a bit of xsl that
does it better. Here's what I've come up with so far:


#### XSL ####
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
    <xsl:output method="html"/>
     <xsl:template match="main">
          <xsl:call-template name="cap">
               <xsl:with-param name="data" select="convert_me"/>
          </xsl:call-template>
     </xsl:template>

     <xsl:template name="cap">
          <xsl:param name="data"/>
           <xsl:if test="$data">
                <xsl:variable name="first_letter"
select="substring($data,1,1)"/>
                <xsl:variable name="upperCase"
select="translate($first_letter,'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz','ABCDEFGHIJKLMN
OPQRSTUVWXYZ')"/>
                <xsl:choose>
                    <!-- IF THE LETTER IS IN UPPERCASE, LEAVE IT AS IT
IS. -->
                     <xsl:when test="$first_letter = $upperCase">
                          <xsl:value-of select="$upperCase"/>
                     </xsl:when>
                       <!-- OTHERWISE (IF THE LETTER IS IN LOWERCASE),
SHRINK IT A TOUCH-->
                     <xsl:otherwise>
                          <span style="font-size:smaller">
                               <xsl:value-of select="$upperCase"/>
                          </span>
                     </xsl:otherwise>
                </xsl:choose>
                <xsl:call-template name="cap">
                     <xsl:with-param name="data"
select="substring($data,2)"/>
                </xsl:call-template>
           </xsl:if>
     </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
#################

Which transforms this:

###### XML #######
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<main>
     <convert_me>This is the First Sentence.</convert_me>
</main>
#################

as expected into this:

######## HTML #############
T<span style="font-size:smaller">H</span><span
style="font-size:smaller">I</span><span style="font-size:smaller">S</span>
<span style="font-size:smaller">I</span><span
style="font-size:smaller">S</span> <span
style="font-size:smaller">T</span><span
style="font-size:smaller">H</span><span style="font-size:smaller">E</span>
F<span style="font-size:smaller">I</span><span
style="font-size:smaller">R</span><span
style="font-size:smaller">S</span><span style="font-size:smaller">T</span>
S<span style="font-size:smaller">E</span><span
style="font-size:smaller">N</span><span
style="font-size:smaller">T</span><span
style="font-size:smaller">E</span><span
style="font-size:smaller">N</span><span
style="font-size:smaller">C</span><span style="font-size:smaller">E</span>.
#########################

Which renders exactly as expected - but it's hardly efficient to have a span
tag around every letter that I want small!

Is there another way? either tweaking my script or a completely different
way.

cheers
brew



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