Question

Is there a border-collapse:collapse alternative for lists, where the li’s are displayed as blocks with a border of 1px solid.

Answer 1

You can remove the top border on all but the first list item by adding:

li:not(:first-child) {
    border-top: 0;
}

http://jsfiddle.net/mblase75/3h8bm/

IE8 and IE7 don’t support :not. However, they do support :first-child, so a workaround is easy:

li {
    border: 1px solid blue;
    border-top: 0;
}
li:first-child {
    border-top: 1px solid blue;
}

http://jsfiddle.net/mblase75/3h8bm/4/

IE6 doesn’t support either of those, so if you’re worried about that browser, you’ll have to add a custom class (say, .first-child) to the first element directly.