How to dynamically add data-role="button"

How to dynamically add data-role="button"

I'm reading in some data from a web service to jquery mobile upon navigating to a new page (data-role="page") and I want to dynamically populate some jquery mobile link buttons, however it appears that the styles are not being applied through the data-role="button".

My code is along the lines of 
      
  2.       var title = DataFromWebService;
  3. var newsButton = "<a href=\"#\" data-role=\"button\">";
  4.         newsButton+= title + "</a>";
  5. $(".newslist").append(newsButton);
The button renders as a plain a tag, is there a reason for this? Im assuming dynamically applying a data-role is not the same as dynamically applying a CSS class?

Thanks