URL rewrite engine functionality?

[HLHJ]

Until recently, my university library had a proxy server. You could use it to access subscription materials from computers off-campus. It was wonderful; I just installed FoxyProxy, and configured my laptop to load all the on-line research journals I use through the library proxy. At a conference halfway around the world, I could plug in my laptop and access articles just as if I was sitting in the library.

Then the library shut down the proxy. They still have a proprietary URL-rewrite system instead (see the Wikipedia article on EZProxy), which works seamlessly if you follow a (rewritten) link from the library website. This breaks all my bookmarks and makes it impossible to follow direct links in citation lists or in bibliography databases, or to use dx.doi.org, etc.; I get a "You do not have a subscription to access this resource..." page.

I am in the process of explaining these problems to my library, and I hope they will fix. However, the rewrite engine changes the URLs in a perfectly predictable pattern. So I could use a rewrite engine of my own to rewrite URLs having my old FoxyProxy patterns to the URLs that would be produced by the rewrite engine, thus restoring the old functionality (except for having to click "OK" on the authentication page each time).

Please tell me if I've missed something, but I can't find any browzer-side URL rewrite engines. Presumably FoxyProxy already does some URL rewriting. Would a user-accessible URL-rewrite be a useful functionality for FoxyProxy to have? EZproxy is a common system, so I can't be the only one with this problem.

[Eric H. Jung]

Please see my reply here.