RE: Myth of loose coupling

> at the application level (and by 
> application I mean something like Amazon's site) I would argue that the 
> client and server are not tightly coupled.  Amazon can make huge changes 
> to its service offerings and layout without any changes being required 
> of the client. 

But from the point of view of the client machine (the browser) there is no change at all. It is still the same old HTML syntax/schema. 
On the other hand, if we look at the "total" interface (HTML + human interpreting the page rendition), the change might indeed be significant. In the extreme case, the information might have been rearranged on the page so much that a person used to the old layout might need to call Amazon to figure out how to deal with the new interface (tight coupling).

Ugo