I find a similar trend with some websites where there's little dead-space for a mouse-click to switch the focus off of a control, hyperlink, or widget towards the document window itself.

This is also particularly irksome on sites which implement full-background ads. The only "non-hot-zones" end up being small parcels of the titlebar or footer.

I recall this concept of "dead/neutral" space mentioned in one Don Norman's books (http://jnd.org).