Re: 'role' should be property

A <roles> element or a <link rel="rolesheet"> seems to me to be a better
idea. It would allow you to specify the default roles of various elements
and collections of elements, rather than repeating that information a
hundred times or more (depending on your page it could be this many). And
you could use any class or ID to specify them, removing any issues with
defined class names. An individual element's role attribute could be used to
override the default roles.

People have said that having external rolesheets is a bad idea, but isn't
this what we already have, except that instead of having them on your site,
they're internal to the user-agent  and based of the HTML spec? User-agents
will already have some sort of system to understand the semantics of a page,
they could then augment that on a per-page basis based on the rolesheet,
rather than based on individual elements' role attributes.