Aaron T. Grogg

This plug-in limits the classes WordPress added to navigation menus to only those desired by the Theme owner, 
adds a unique ID to each <code>li</code> and removes any empty <code>class</code> attributes.
More about this plug-in can be found at: 
http://aarontgrogg.com/2011/09/28/wordpress-plug-in-navigation-menu-ids-classes/
Please let me know if you have any questions/suggestions/thoughts,
Atg

Navigation Menu IDs & Classes

At least some aspect of this plugin seems like it should be available in WordPress core. 
I understand the rationale for menu items having menu-item-ID, but it's pretty practical for them to have the slug in there, as this plugin provides.
Suggestion for plugin feature - offer option for slug prefix.
Like if I have a menu item "updates" I may use the class "updates" elsewhere, but class "menu-item-updates" would target the menu-item for sure. Of course I can currently use double selectors.



1 for inclusion in core

To reduce the extraneous WordPress classes and add unique IDs to navigation menus.

This WordPress plugin adds to your default editor (TinyMCE) the ability to detect semantic entities on your post content and link them to their official wikipedia page for further reading.

xowl-client

This plugin improves the default TinyMCE editor to recognize entities on all the user's posts.

Navigation Menu IDs & Classes vs xowl-client