I wasn't involved in SVG, but knew quite a few of the people involved around the working group. Seeing socket support mentioned certainly raised a smile: one of

I wasn't involved in SVG, but knew quite a few of the people involved around the working group. Seeing socket support mentioned certainly raised a smile: one of the team was quite keen on writing a pure-svg IRC client, I think. It wasn't an explicit goal of SVG 1.2 to replace Flash. You should be able to dig out the working group charter to check that. However the way these groups worked was that there were various communities ('stakeholders' if you must) who contributed thoughts and ideas. At least one of the companies implementing SVG certainly did want a Flash competitor, and so was keen on sockets. I think they all knew it wouldn't fly, but they get excited. You see the same with Chrome and stuff like USB and Bluetooth access.