Modal(Lightbox/thickbox) displays are great to focus users' attention on to a particular task. There are some places where the user needs to be focussed on a particular portion of a web page without losing the context of the surrounding user interface elements. Inplace modal displays a overlay around the user interface element that needs focus.

Unfortunately, I don't have the application where I am using this idea published yet. But here is a demo of the concept with the jQuery script:

http://site.ringce.com/code/jQuery/jquery-inplace-modal.html