I appreciate the desire to make the code easier to edit. We're definitely open to suggestions. In this case, there are a few reasons why we've coded it as we have.
The name attribute is only available to form elements in HTML5. The id would be the next likely attribute to use, but it is already used by in5, and it must be unique (which script labels do not).
As you noted in your question the script label is applied to the alt tag, this can be access easily by a developer using the following jQuery syntax
$('[alt=scriptLabelName]')