Lightboxes are a very effective tool for FORCIBLY FOCUSING YOUR ATTENTION RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW. What do most commercial websites want to forcibly focus your at

Lightboxes are a very effective tool for FORCIBLY FOCUSING YOUR ATTENTION RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW. What do most commercial websites want to forcibly focus your attention on right here right now? Yeah. Adverts. It's an arms race. Advertisers will always use the most in-your-face tool available. First it was banner ads, before Javascript and pop-ups became common. Banner blockers appeared. Then it was pop-ups, until the broader community and browser vendors decided that the S/N ratio for pop-ups was so low that we were better off killing them entirely. Then it was Flash, with the added benefit of literal noise... and now Flash-blocking is an essential component of any browser. The current advertising tool of choice is lightboxes and other floating divs: harder to automatically distinguish from actual desired content within HTML, but we're starting to see browser addons and tools that can do that blocking job too. Currently gaining in popularity is requiring that an advertisement appear and be experienced in its entirety before any access to content at all. Hulu led the way on this. Well, unless you count television and radio which discovered that format about sixty or ninety years ago. The market response was the VCR then DVR once the technology was feasible. Next move: a "web DVR" that will experience the ads for you and "record" the web site until it can be played back without the interruption?