Alternate background colors for list items

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');
});

How about some lovely CSS3?

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