While I agree that they're often misused in forms, I'm not a 100% convinced that killing the cancel button is the right way to go. They're increasingly used as

While I agree that they're often misused in forms, I'm not a 100% convinced that killing the cancel button is the right way to go. They're increasingly used as a web equivalent of the "close" button and in that context, they do function quite well. A substantial portion of both users and AJAX apps still don't use/support the back button effectively. And when there's a form overlaying the content, using a cancel button to get rid of it does make a fair amount of intuitive sense...