HTML minifiers don't actually compress in this sense. They remove comments, strip out extraneous whitespace, replace long tags and attributes with equivalent shorter ones (strong->b), normalize markup where possible and so forth. The result is still HTML: no extra decompression step is needed for it to be understood and rendered by any renderer compliant with the standard the tool targets.

General compression can get much better results than content translation. Check mod_deflate, mod_gzip, or what-ever your preferred web server's equivalent is (all modern servers aside from those designed to be absolutely minimal (for embedded systems and such) have one).