Should role="contentinfo" be always added on footer element?

Question

On ARIA demonstration websites, role="contentinfo" is usually added on footer element.

However, footers in modern web design can be creative so that they can also contain things like supplementary navigation links, social website links, or even a newsletter form.

Taking the following codes of footer for example. Should role="contentinfo" be added on the footer or the p element?

<footer>
    <nav>
        <ul>
            ........
            ........
            ........
            ........
            ........
        </ul>
    </nav>
    <form>
        ........
        ........
        ........
    </form>
    <p>© 2012 Website.com. All rights reserved.</p>
</footer>

EDIT: I had asked this question by utilizing the W3C ARIA mailing list, and Steve Faulkner, a member of W3C HTML Working Group has replied. The following is his suggestion:

I would also take into account how browsers map the footer element to accessibility APIs.
In Firefox the footer is mapped to ARIA role=contentinfo
In Webkit/safari/chrome the footer is mapped to ARIA role=group if it is contained within a section or article element otherwise it is mapped to role=contentinfo
In IE it is not mapped

So doing this:
<div role="contentinfo">
    some content
    <footer>some content</footer>
</div>

will lead to nested contentinfo landmarks being announced in browsers that already map footer to contentinfo.

I would suggest therefore that adding role=contentinfo to the main footer, not worrying too much about content that you think may not be appropriate being in the footer.

So the suggested approach is adding role="contentinfo" to the main footer.

Answer 1

I think it should be on the footer tag in your case.

It is meant to give information about the parent document, so I would use it if your footer elements give a good context of the parent.

https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/#contentinfo