Question

Is it required? Optional? Does it benefit anything more than performance speed?

# created .htaccess file in the web root:

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>

    SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

</IfModule>

php_flag magic_quotes_gpc off

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([^./]{3}[^.]*)$ /index.php?page=$1 [QSA,L]

Answer 1

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