I had developed Apache module mod_deflate that allow to gzip or deflate content:
ftp://ftp.lexa.ru/pub/apache-rus/contrib/mod_deflate-1.0.7.tar.gz This module tested at one of the loaded Russian sites - www.rambler.ru and several other small Russian sites. Documentation in Russion only but basic configuration is very simple: DeflateEnable on mod_deflate encodes 'text/*' content type. By default mod_deflate allows encoding if request is HTTP/1.1 and request is not proxied (it can be changed). So Netscape 4 requests is not encoded by default. During testing I found some browser bugs with gzip: MSIE 4.x can't handle gzipped content if length of URL string without 'http://' prefix is bigger then 253 characters. Mozilla 0.9.1 and Netscape 6.1b1 don't understand encoding if header line has tralling spaces - "Content-Encoding: gzip ". Macromedia FlashPlayer 4.x-5.x doesn't understand gzipped content recieved by browser via getVariables() function. Igor Sysoev
