Happy to take this on.

@pkra: Sold! Thanks!!

BTW: I've just requested that you be added to the official contributor group so you can assign yourself officially, and also create branches within our repo. Most members don't fork, but create branches here.

Thanks, will do!

After a bit of research, it seems the situation around cite hasn't moved much in the last few years, despite hopes to the contrary after reducing its scope in HTML5 (from virtually anything in HTML4 to just "creative work").

• the WHATWG and W3C spec still disagree -- WHATWG only wants creative works as content, W3C still seems to allow author names as well.
• for practical purposes, schema.org is probably more relevant and uses a very different approach.

I still find the following quote from an old HTML5doctor article fitting:

The dirty secret of all this is the element has historically been semantics for the sake of semantics. So far, the only non-site-specific application of is browser default stylesheets, which format it with font-style: italic;.

I have not found evidence to the contrary, so it seems to me that role=cite should map to the generic role until HTML clarifies its definition.

Some references:

• W3C spec entry
• WHATWG spec
• WHATWG wiki on history
• 2011 article on ### html5doc
• 2013 article on htmldoctor
• Jeremy Keith's 2009 24ways article
• schema.org citation (which doesn't make a lot of sense on its own but look at examples in creaiveWork or scholarlyArticle)

@pkra will you be around to present your findings at next week's (28 Feb) meeting? If so, could you please add the 'agenda' label to this issue so that it winds up on that agenda? Thanks!

Yes, I'll be there.

I've added the label "Agenda".

The ARIA Working Group just discussed cite role.

unassigning myself since the WG agreed that cite will be generic.

as it was decided that the cite element will map to the generic role, there's no work left to do here. closing.