A peer-reviewed study on the practise of “zebra striping” tables in print and on the web. I don’t use them, but I recognize the aesthetic qualities of hinting alternating rows in tables. No real scientific evidence of them helping readers read tables any faster, though.
Unfortunately, this study hasn’t given us a clear answer about whether or not to continue applying zebra stripes to tabular data. However, it didn’t give any indication that zebra striping makes things worse, and we do know that it is liked by a number of users, so it certainly doesn’t seem to cause much harm.
At the end of the day, the decision about whether to use zebra striping probably comes down to a subjective assessment of likely gains versus the cost of implementation.
Given that implementing a simple if ($count % 2) condition is all you need to add zebra striping, ‘cost of implementation’ is realistically zero.