Alternate background colors for list items

How about some lovely CSS3?

li { background: green; }
li:nth-child(odd) { background: red; }

If you want to do this purely in CSS then you'd have a class that you'd assign to each alternate list item. E.g.

<ul>
    <li class="alternate"><a href="link">Link 1</a></li>
    <li><a href="link">Link 2</a></li>
    <li class="alternate"><a href="link">Link 3</a></li>
    <li><a href="link">Link 4</a></li>
    <li class="alternate"><a href="link">Link 5</a></li>
</ul>

If your list is dynamically generated, this task would be much easier.

If you don't want to have to manually update this content each time, you could use the jQuery library and apply a style alternately to each <li> item in your list:

<ul id="myList">
    <li><a href="link">Link 1</a></li>
    <li><a href="link">Link 2</a></li>
    <li><a href="link">Link 3</a></li>
    <li><a href="link">Link 4</a></li>
    <li><a href="link">Link 5</a></li>
</ul>

And your jQuery code:

$(document).ready(function(){
  $('#myList li:nth-child(odd)').addClass('alternate');
});

You can achieve this by adding alternating style classes to each list item

<ul>
    <li class="odd"><a href="link">Link 1</a></li>
    <li><a href="link">Link 2</a></li>
    <li class="odd"><a href="link">Link 2</a></li>
    <li><a href="link">Link 2</a></li>
</ul>

And then styling it like

li { backgorund:white; }
li.odd { background:silver; }

You can further automate this process with javascript (jQuery example below)

$(document).ready(function() {
  $('table tbody tr:odd').addClass('odd');
});

Try adding a pair of class attributes, say 'even' and 'odd', to alternating list elements, e.g.

<ul>
    <li class="even"><a href="link">Link 1</a></li>
    <li class="odd"><a href="link">Link 2</a></li>
    <li class="even"><a href="link">Link 3</a></li>
    <li class="odd"><a href="link">Link 4</a></li>
    <li class="even"><a href="link">Link 5</a></li>
</ul>

In a <style> section of the HTML page, or in a linked stylesheet, you would define those same classes, specifying your desired background colours:

li.even { background-color: red; }
li.odd { background-color: blue; }

You might want to use a template library as your needs evolve to provide you with greater flexibility and to cut down on the typing. Why type all those list elements by hand?

This is set background color on even and odd li:

  li:nth-child(odd) { background: #ffffff; }
  li:nth-child(even) { background: #80808030; }

Since you using standard HTML you will need to define separate class for and manual set the rows to the classes.

You can do it by specifying alternating class names on the rows. I prefer using row0 and row1, which means you can easily add them in, if the list is being built programmatically:

for ($i = 0; $i < 10; ++$i) {
    echo '<tr class="row' . ($i % 2) . '">...</tr>';
}

Another way would be to use javascript. jQuery is being used in this example:

$('table tr:odd').addClass('row1');

Edit: I don't know why I gave examples using table rows... replace tr with li and table with ul and it applies to your example

You can by hardcoding the sequence, like so:

li, li + li + li, li + li + li + li + li {
  background-color: black;
}

li + li, li + li + li + li {
  background-color: white;
}