Is there a (maybe undocumented?) way to directly access/manipulate the attributes of SVG elements?

The visualization I'm working on utilizes many custom cursors, and it makes the most sense to me to embed offsets (that put the right part of the cursor at the center) in the SVG itself. This is a really simple example, but there are many other attributes that I'd like to be able to access or manipulate for my project.

I've played with the Geomerative package, but I don't see a way to get to the attributes directly there either. I might be able to get it to work with Batik, but that seems a little overkill just to get at the attributes of elements.