Cancel button ux

1. What does a Cancel button do?
2. Should cancel be a button or link?
3. What is the difference between cancel and close button?

What does a Cancel button do?

What does the Cancel button do exactly? It dismisses the user's current screen and brings them back to their previous screen. This dismissive button is a safeguard to prevent unwanted changes to the system. But when it looks like a call to action button, it's hard to recognize.

Should cancel be a button or link?

To summarize

The cancel option is similar to aborting an action, and therefore similar to navigating back to the previous state of the UI. Navigation is represented in web UI as hyperlinks, and thus the cancel option should be a hyperlink.

What is the difference between cancel and close button?

Presenting two distinct buttons: X for closing the view (with the side effect of saving intermediate work) and Cancel for abandoning the process.