tab snobs

I know that there are many, many guitarists out there who are "tab snobs", i.e. completely against the idea of communicating a music score in any other form than in familiar music notation. There are of course many, many, many more guitarists who can't read music or know where any notes are located on their instrument. So the tab snobs' position is somewhat understandable. But historically they're on the shakiest of ground, because if we go back and look at lute music from the 16th and 17th centuries it was only written in... (drum roll please) ...tablature. For the briefest of introductions check this site out. Also the Frederick Noad anthologies of Renaissance and Baroque music have some info regarding this, plus of course the Harvard Dictionary of Music, etc.

The reason that tab is useful is that it locates exactly where notes are to be played. In classical guitar scores this is settled by using a lot of extra information: fingerings, strings, positions, etc, which in a sense amounts to a tablature overlay on the score. I think that only offering up the notes without any indication of position and so on is lazy, unless we're only concerned about analyzing the notes and not playing them.