Link or Button?

[acer34e]

I learned CSS and basic xhtml while I was working for a Web Design start-up. The business has taken off, but I have missed out on some basics. I wouldn't know where to start making an html table (though I hear that's no loss).
I had made a few product includes for a customer and there were two links that needed to be put in place: a buy button that adds a quantity of one to an off site shopping cart, and a Learn More button that goes to a Product Info. Page. I coded them as links( <a href> ) and a colleague said it should be an input type=button. Unfortunately he didn't say why, and I can't find anything via google to justify this. It's not that I don't believe him, I do, and I am changing it now, but I want to know for future reference when buttons should be used instead of links and why. Is there a reason why it's going to work better than a link? Is it easier to format with CSS?
Thank you for your help. I hope your answers will make a good tutorial for anyone else wondering the same.

 

[jmad]

hope i am understanding ur question right. the learn more button should jus be a link but the buy button should be a input because u r wanting to send that input.
maybe something like this :
<form name="form" method="post" action="offsite_shopping_cart.php">
<input type="hidden" name="item" value="+1">
<input type="submit" value="item">
</form>
hope this helps i did somthing like this for a client of mine. the of site is the name of the page ur sending the input to. for more info on this go to w3schools.com look up forms in html.

 

[zkiller]

the only reasoning i can think of why a button/ form would be better is that it allows you to send various hidden information, such as variables, that the user does see.

in regards to html tables - while these are not needed when using html in conjunction with css, they are still a very handy tool and they don't have any cross browser compatibility issues. here is an example of a very basic table...

<table>
   <tr> -table row
      <tr>content here</tr> -table colum or cell. 
      <td>more content here</td> -one cell can span multiple colums
   </tr>
</table>

hope that helps.