There should be a way to set options through the code rather than with non-standard attributes. It would be cleaner and would follow the standards, as well as not confusing things if some joined multiple plugins into the one file etc.

Ahh, wait I see now that it's really quite easy!

Perhaps the docs should recommend using defaults rather than the attributes though...

Yea, it was a bad coding practice I learned years ago that's followed me through. I've been slowly updating my plugins to remove the use of custom, non-standard attributes and am moving towards a new solution for it. When I get a chance, I'll update the docs to discourage using the custom attribute solution for setting defaults in the code.

With the next release, support for non-standard attributes will be retired.