Ah, great idea! Never thought of that
The reason being, I want a similar look to the listing in the middle of this site:
http://journal.media-culture.org.au/
So using CSS, I can set the background as a coloured block, no repeat, and aligned left, then apply a bottom border.
If this is only applied to the DIV or UL, you just get one line and one coloured block against the whole list, rather than the correct look of a block and border per LI item.