In short: no. Today's programmable Internet is an existence proof of this answer. In the 90s and early-2000s there were a lot of attempts to codify machine-di

In short: no. Today's programmable Internet is an existence proof of this answer. In the 90s and early-2000s there were a lot of attempts to codify machine-discoverable protocols: WSDL, SOAP, etc. There are still a lot of people that are sort of obsessed with this idea. Three things have happened: (1) the weight and complexity that's come along with those protocols has been larger than the value they bring. Auto-generating proxies just isn't that helpful when you still need a human brain to figure out how to connect things together and make them useful. (2) The growth and success cloud-based apps shows that better protocols are not a necessary factor on today's Internet. This does not deny that better/faster/richer protocols could improve things, it's just not clear that's a critical-path problem. It's just not hard to look at REST docs and wire shit together, regardless if it's optimal or not. (3) Layering app-level use cases over HTTP (HATEOAS, OAUTH) works pretty well when you're navigating known domains.