Another thing which is sad but true is some developers feel the need to face off development tools and technologies in some sort of 'coolness' competition. When in fact, there are many more reasons behind why one might choose a particular implementation than "what is the current flavor of the month?"

Interesting to see so many down votes to my comment.

Even Microsoft leadership has admitted ASP.NET MVC is a better choice for public facing (non-intranet) websites.

My comment was only to make the point that they were using an outdated web framework, so it's likely that their markup is probably also outdated.

What's interesting in this set of guidelines is basically all the front-end development goodies (stylings, grids, js) not the backend. It looks very decent to me, and it was probably made by a completely different department than ASP's, So thats why the comment comes a little irrelevant in this case.

The main site uses ASP.NET MVC. It's just this style guide, which was probably never meant to be public, that seems to use old-style *.aspx files in some areas.

What would outdated markup have to do with striping table rows?

This is why you're getting downvotes, you really don't seem to have any idea what you're talking about.