[rwmj]

Unless you're dealing with binary data in which case byte order matters very much and if you forget to convert it you're causing a world of pain for someone.

He even has an example where he just pushes the problem off to someone else "if the people at Adobe wrote proper code to encode and decode their files", yeah hope they weren't ignoring byte order issues.

[GMoromisato]

The article's point is that the machine's byte order doesn't matter. The byte order of a data stream of course matters, but they show a way to load a binary data stream without worrying about the machine's byte order.

That key insight is that people shouldn't try to optimize the case where the data stream's byte order happens to match the machine's byte order. That's both premature optimization and a recipe for bugs. Just don't worry about that case.

Load binary data one byte at a time and use shifts and ORs to compose the larger unit based on the data's byte order. That's 100% portable without any #ifdefs for the machine's byte order.