Is it required? Optional? Does it benefit anything more than performance speed?
<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
</IfModule>
php_flag magic_quotes_gpc off
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([^./]{3}[^.]*)$ /index.php?page=$1 [QSA,L]
Gzipping generally reduces the response size by about 70%. Approximately 90% of today's
Internet traffic travels through browsers that claim to support gzip. If you use Apache, the module configuring gzip depends on your version: Apache 1.3 uses mod_gzip while Apache 2.x uses mod_deflate.
For more info chekcout : http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html