Great moments in Web history: the dude who "developed" alternating table row colors
I'm completely lost when it comes to determining exactly who came across the notion of using alternating row colors in large lists of tabular data - something that's become a practice in such great use that one would assume that it would wear out its welcome, but most definelty not. But we would all be wise to tip our collective hat to this person for their discovery.
I recall the early days of ASP 3.0 when the only thing I'd ever use modulus logic for would be to assign BGCOLOR=“#CCCCCC“ to odd-numbered rows. As alternating row formatting became more popular based on its relative ease of setting up and dynamic results, people started creating components and DreamWeaver plugins just to do it!
My best guess would be to assume that someone in the Web community around 1999 started putting old Excel report formatting tricks to use within web documents. Heck, the practice became so widespread, a big draw for people just getting into ASP.NET is the fact that the platform makes automates the formatting of such considerations in the List web server controls for those of us who latched onto the “every-other-row-looks-different” mentality.
Jakob Nielsen would (should) be proud.