One thing that I don't understand is how to rewrite the ugly links into friendly links on the fly within the HTML?
In IIS Rewrite Module it has Outbound rules which looks at the <a> tag and if there is a link in there which matches a pattern that you specify, then it will change that link into a friendly link. At the same time you write an Inbound rule that resolved the friendly link into the fully qualified ugly link so that the correct page is displayed.
In mod_rewrite I only seem to be able to deal with resolving links. How do you get it to rewrite the ugly links that are within the HTML on my page into friendly ones?