You have three options:
Style links to look like buttons using CSS.
Just look at the light blue "tags" under your question.
It is possible, even to give them a depressed appearance when clicked (using pseudo-classes like :active), without any scripting. Lots of major sites, such as Google, are starting to make buttons out of CSS styles these days anyway, scripting or not.
Put a separate <form> element around each one.
As you mentioned in the question. Easy and will definitely work without Javascript (or even CSS). But it adds a little extra code which may look untidy.
Rely on Javascript.
Which is what you said you didn't want to do.