What does Network byte order and use of it ?

Question

Why htons and htonl are mandatory to use ?

Answer 1

There are mainly two types of endianness known as little-endian and big-endian. Endianness just tells you "How to store data in memory". In case of big-endianness, most significant byte of a word is stored in lower address and the least significant byte of a word is stored in higher address. IETF RFC uses term "network byte order", it is nothing but big endian order.