Is there any purpose for the role attribute?

eruna · February 4, 2011, 5:36pm

I was making a WordPress template and noticed the use of the attribute:
role=‘main’

Is there any purpose for this attribute? Most mark up would be self explanatory
ie: <div id=‘main’ > <div id=‘footer’>

Thanks for your comments,

E

xhtmlcoder · February 4, 2011, 7:15pm

Potentially, theoretically it allows the author to annotate markup languages with machine-extractable semantic information.

rguy84 · February 4, 2011, 8:47pm

The role attribute comes from ARIA.