⟩ If a font contains kerning and ligature info, does an SVG renderer apply these transformations?
My best guess is that the answer will be 'yes' but I'm still doing my homework. I believe an SVG processor, just like a CSS processor, should take advantage of any intelligence built into a font.
Note that SVG will provide an 'altglyph' facility so that authoring products can precisely control which glyphs are used and thus override any automatic font features.