Cut the CSS Fat

Hey all. I'm relatively new to Drupal in the past six months and overall I love it. In general, the Drupal sites I've developed are relatively easy to maintain and the community built around the CMS is responsive and helpful.

However, there is one thing that keeps on tripping me up: there is all sorts of additional markup that is generated that is just plain unnecessary for the display and styling of pages. I'd like to explore the feasibility of reducing some of the markup that is output in future versions of Drupal (probably beginning with v7 since v6's core code was just frozen, right?).

Here's an example of what I'm talking about. The primary links on one of my sites:

<ul class="links primary-links">
<li class="first menu-1-1-2"><a href="favorites" class="menu-1-1-2">My Favorites</a></li>
<li class="menu-1-2-2"><a href="product" class="menu-1-2-2">Store</a></li>
<li class="menu-1-3-2"><a href="forum" class="menu-1-3-2">Message Board</a></li>
<li class="last menu-1-4-2"><a href="categories/all" class="menu-1-4-2">Browse Categories</a></li>
</ul>

There's no reason to repeat the class on the li's and the descendant a's since you can style descendant selectors via css. That is, if you wanted to style the first link based on its class, you could just use the following css markup

li.menu-1-1-2 a {
/*whatever my style is*/
}

So the markup I would like to see for my primary links would be

<ul class="links primary-links">
<li class="first menu-1-1-2"><a href="favorites">My Favorites</a></li>
<li class="menu-1-2-2"><a href="product">Store</a></li>
<li class="menu-1-3-2"><a href="forum">Message Board</a></li>
<li class="last menu-1-4-2"><a href="categories/all">Browse Categories</a></li>
</ul>

In fact, I'd like to see a less verbose option available that removes the classes from the li's, as well. I'd argue that the :first and :last pseduo-selectors are becoming more widely supported and you can effectively target browsers that don't support the pseudo-selectors through jQuery... and I would guess that there are many Drupal users that don't always have the need to style each individual primary link.

I'm also not sold on the idea of using positioniseverything's easy clearing in modules/system/defaults.css (http://www.positioniseverything.net/easyclearing.html). That adds all sorts of extra classes all over the place. It might be nice to have an option to insert the clears via jQuery, if a user is so inclined or to develop markup that doesn't require CSS that's full of hacks. The positioniseverything technique was developed in 2004/2005. It's at least time to take a good hard look and see if it's still the best way to accomplish effective floats.

Thoughts? Feedback? What am I missing?