Laurens,
We formally considered the issue you brought up regarding @cite, which
is ISSUE-109:
http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/track/issues/109
Our resolution was along the lines of what Mark already mentioned in his
email: we considered @cite but realized that many other attributes would
then require RDFa interpretation and that doing so is not simple. We
chose to defer this issue to a future version of RDFa.
Let us know if that is an acceptable resolution for you, as far as RDFa
1.0 is concerned.
Thanks,
-Ben