Location of span for clearing floats after each tabset - does it need to be in JavaScript?

I'm trying to theme an additional *normal* link to the end of a set of tabs, but the JavaScript in tabs.js sticks a <span class="clear"></span> after the div so I can't float anything up against it. My question is, is there a sensible reason why this is in tabs.js (line 44) and not in the theme_tabs() function in the module? If it were in the theme function then I could just remove it in certain cases, but as it is I'm stuck with it.

Happy to provide a patch to move it to the theme function, if there is no issue with this?