I've always wanted a better way, and two things I've looked at recently inspired me to think it might be possible: Dmitry Baranovskiy's fantastic work on the Raphaël SVG library, and Alex Gorbatchev's syntaxhighlighter.
So now I can introduce the result of my latest weekend project:
jTab - newly minted and ready to rock and roll!
See the project home page at http://jtab.tardate.com for more examples and information about how you can use it too. jTab is open source, with the master source code repository on github .
What does it do?
jTab is a javascript-based library that allows you to easily render arbitrary guitar chord and tabulature (tab) notation on the web. It handles implicit and automatic rendering of any page elements given the special class name 'jtab'. It can also be scripted for more sophisticated or interactive effects.
Bottom line: jTab turns this..
<div class="jtab">Bm $3 4 4h5p3h4 5 $2 3 5 7 7h8p7 5/7 | A $4 7 9 $3 7 6 $5 9 $4 7h9 7 $5 9\7 5/7 | </div>
..into this:
Grab it, use it, help me improve it, or just let me what you think...