I've interacted with a few RESTful APIs that provided excellent documentation for humans and descriptive URIs, but none of them seem to return machine-readable descriptions of themselves.

It's not too tough to write methods of my own that assemble the right paths, and many language-specific API libraries are already just wrappers around RESTful requests. But the next level of abstraction seems really useful: a library that could read in an API's own machine readable documentation and generate the wrappers automatically, perhaps with a call to some standard URI like base_url + '/documentation'

Are there any standards for machine-readable API documentation? Am I doing REST wrong? I am a relatively new programmer, but this seems like a good idea.