Children of the Internet, put down your drinks, put iTunes on mute and pay good attention. The ;quot;big players;quot; of the blogging world have suddenly discovered LightBox and a company called Aweber have turned it into a bundled package of evil.

For those who don't know what LightBox is; it was a Javascript enhanced piece of website layout that allows a new layer to overlay the entire visible page thus taking user focus to the item in question. This was originally used for images (see the original LightBox implementation) but people soon used similar effects for other things. I use it a lot in my work as a web developer - in fact a site we recently launched (Nido Student Living) has the effect when you click ;quot;Where Next;quot; in the header.

It's great for enhancing a specific call to action or enriching user experience for media. However, upon visiting John Chow's site today I was greeted with this blatent disregard for the user:



The reasons this makes me upset
1. It's a popup, these are invasive and show a lack of respect for the user
2. John's site loads pretty slowly, so the site essentially loads and then it leaps out at you
3. In Firefox (as well as Opera, maybe more too) you can't actually see the close button, as the layer is incorrectly sized so all you see is scroll bars and the form

So as a user it's on a par with people installing popup advertising on their website, something I find unforgivable.
As a web developer it's poorly implemented and looks sore. As an accessibility enthusiast (it's part of my job, obviously) it's appalling because this layer appears without any clear way of getting rid of it. In Opera the scroll bars refused to work while the page continued to load - something that takes a long time on John's advertising-rich site.

So please bloggers, I emplore you to ignore the quotes that John and Darren (Rowse) have about how well it increases subscription numbers. It's evil for aesthetics, usability, accessibility and reader confidence. It's so bad that if I was visiting an unfamiliar site and it popped up, I'd close the browser tab and never return.

Don't alienate thousands of potential readers just for an extra couple of subscribers - it isn't worth it.