[danielvaughn]

In my experience this coupling cannot be avoided. At a bare minimum the client has to know the communication protocol of the server. This means you typically need to define this protocol in both the server and client. If you could define it once and have both the client and server pull from the single source, it's a win.

[stickyricky]

The coupling is to the data interchange format. The server is not coupled to the client and the client is not coupled to the server.