I just posted version 1.3 of TabLinks. It doesn’t fix all of the things I eventually want to fix, but it does do some rudimentary entity encoding that allows you to actually use HTML tags in the templates. I had said that <a href="%u">%t</a> would work as a template, but it didn’t. Now it does.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://brettterpstra.com/2010/06/26/minor-tablinks-update