Vertical alignment property for a text block, so text can be shown at the top, the bottom, or centered.
This only makes sense for a flowed text block which has a frame to align to, not for regular text. Still, it would be a useful possibility.
More precisely, it's only really practical for text flowed into a frame whose width is constant (although it wouldn't be much fun trying to implement it for parallelograms either). I can't think of an algorithm for vertical positioning of text in an arbitrary shape that is more efficient than Newton-Raphson style repeated retries, and even that might not produce the right answer for some shapes.
SVG Tiny 1.2's textArea element can only do rectangles and does specify a display-align property for vertical alignment.
As for word spacing, I'm not sure it is even supported when specified in SVG, and there are no shortcuts. But it should be doable without much difficulty I think.
The word-spacing and letter-spacing CSS attributes are implemented and worked the last time I tried them. Again, no UI.
Richard.