Great piece about the first photo on the web, not only interesting from a technical point of view:

de Gennaro had been toying around with a scanned .gif version of the July 18th photo, using version one of Photoshop on his color Macintosh. The .gif format was only five years old at the time, but its efficient compression had made it the best way to edit color images without slowing PCs to a crawl.

The photo is quite horrible but so emblematic for a lot of stuff the web is used for today. As the article states, this was basically the beginning of fun on the web. But, although really not great, I don’t think Niépce’s photo was that horrible.