As I understand it, roles were initially defined by XHTML but were deprecated. However, they are now defined by HTML 5, see here: http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/#roles
The purpose of the role attribute is to identify to parsing software the exact function of an element (and its children) as part of a web application. This is mostly as an accessibility thing for screen readers, but I can also see it as being useful for embedded browsers and screen scrapers. In order to be useful to the unusual HTML client, the attribute needs to be set to one of the roles from the spec I linked. If you make up your own, this 'future' functionality can't work - a comment would be better.
Practicalities here: http://www.accessibleculture.org/articles/2011/04/html5-aria-2011/
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