Interesting Interview

During an interview, the interviewee drew an image of a checker board on the white board and asked me to code it on the white board.  So I began to code it using javascript and built a string var containing the table markup to represent a checker board.  When I was finished, he looked at it and asked me some questions regarding it.  So I began to defend my code...

Two days later, I decided to actually build out the checker board from the interview and saw where I could improve upon my original code.  This time I used HTML5 and JQuery. Here is a snipit of the code I came up with to display a checker board;

<script src="js/jquery-1.10.2.js"></script>
        <script type="text/javascript">
            $(document).ready(function (){
                var iRow = 8;
                var iCol = 8;
                
                var sHtml = "<table id='tblCB' style='margin:0 auto; border-collapse:collapse;box-shadow: 1px 1px 1px #999;'>";
                
                //generate rows
                for(var i = 0; i < iRow; i++){
                    sHtml += "<tr>";
                                        
                    //generate columns
                    for(var x = 0; x < iCol; x++){
                        if((i%2 == 0 && x%2 != 0) || (i%2 != 0 && x%2 == 0)){
                            sHtml += "<td class='dark' style='margin:0;border:1px solid #000;'>&nbsp;</td>";
                        }else{
                            sHtml += "<td style='margin:0;border:1px solid #000;'>&nbsp;</td>";
                                    
                        }
                    }
                    sHtml += "</tr>";
                }
                sHtml += "</table>";
                
                $("#board").html(sHtml);
            });
        </script>

I would like some feedback on this, and would welcome alternatives just so I can see how others think logically.