Here is a short article i found at
They obviously are not big fans of Flash but should give you an idea of the (lack of) similarities as far as the inner workings of the two formats.
I will post more if I find more.
SVG vs SWF
It's very important to be able to view and understand the files created with authoring tools, and to be in control by being able to modify them by hand. That's important for correcting errors, optimizing the code and for inserting constructs the application doesn't support. This way, the author does not solely depend on software-applications. With the binary SWF-files that's pretty difficult.
SVG is XML, thus sharing the syntax and grammar of all other XML languages, thus
1) multiple XMLnamespaces can be combined in one doc, and
2) many aspects need to be learned only once.
Flash + SWF is a great authoring tool and data format to create interactive vector-animations; but it's a binary format, so authors need software to produce it, and since the source-code is not text, it's nearly impossible to work with the files without a program; this limits the possibilities and requires expensive software.
XML is the markup-language architecture which is the basis for a whole new generation of markup-languages, such as custom XML-"vocabularies", industry-namespaces, etc which work hand-in-hand with other XML-namespaces such as the styling-language XSL, the transformation-language XSLT, and many other XML-languages. All code is text, so people can write programs to work with the files, designers can assign style-sheets and authors can modify the documents easily. This is a new system of technologies, currently under development at w3.org, which will take the web and the worlds of publishing, writing, design, knowledge-management to a new era.
SVG is an XML-language for describing interactive vector-animations.