AS2 loadClip and .ai format

Folks,

Does flash natively support the .ai image format? I am new to flash and recently found out that with SVG is not supported. We are using loadClip to load png images into a MovieClip and these png need to be replaced with either svg or ai formats.

My questions are

  1. If svg is not supported, how about ai format? Will loadClip work with .ai ?
  2. Any recommendations for a popular SVG parser?

Will appreciate any insights since I am a newbie