Small Caps – decoration or semantics?

I think of Bike more as an instrument for shaping and reshaping the meaning of a document than for decorating or clothing it in a particular uniform,
but I would personally like to be able to conserve as much as possible of the semantic markup as possible in import / export between Bike and the range of formats which Pandoc, for example, supports.

One form of markup which the Pandoc model does include is small caps, but I notice that Discourse doesn’t support it, and I wonder where it falls on a spectrum between meaning and decoration ?

Wikipedia does report some active use in complexity theory, linguistics, and the conventions of some publications, but I think it’s mainly closer to formal dress than to clear distinctions in meaning ?

Does anyone here make regular use of a semantic distinction between SmallCaps and regular Caps ?

@jonsterling ?