Mark Pilgrim's article about web services in Python contains one important bit that is often overlooked by people implementing web services with XML-RPC, the listMethods extension. The Python Server Objects documentation explains each method: listMethods(), methodSignature(), and methodHelp().
listMethods() and its companions provide much of the same information for an XML-RPC service as WSDL does for a SOAP service and if everyone that runs an XML-RPC service would provide these methods it would take a lot of wind out of the sails of WSDL. There is no need to define any additional standards, we already have a solution. Of course, the information provided is human readable, not machine readable, so if we wanted a more machine readable form, we could define some companion methods that always output XML. WSDL is not really human readable and I haven't seen any human readable SOAP service description.
XML-RPC in Python on O'Reilly ONLamp shows how these methods are utilized by meerkat.
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