I haven’t thought that deeply, but I think what you said makes sense. However seems more like implementation of output that the render could figure out themselves (e.g. tooltip view instead).
Does bring to mind if it would cause clashes with other uses of the metadata e.g. html id. In that case should it be addressed by [name](url){id=<html_id>}{cite <metadata>}? I see you are using {cite <metadata>}, but not sure if we have any similar context in conceptialising this with the currently adhoc community accepted idea of Consistent attribute syntax.
[Understanding KaZaA](https://cse.engineering.nyu.edu/~ross/papers/UnderstandingKaZaA.pdf){id=understanding_kazaa}{cite author = "Jian Liang, Rakesh Kumar, Keith W. Ross", title = "Understanding KaZaA", year = "2004"}
Would that be in keeping with your idea? Not sure if we can intermix cite metadata with attributes.
Recall that I want to be able to associate citation metadata with links at the very least. Not sure what would be sane for paragraphs and sections however.