The 1-Byte Restaurant Review Guide

I was digging through the archives a bit tonight, and I realized that I'd referred to this a couple times but never actually codified it. So rather than waiting for the gent that helped me start this idea some years ago, I'm going to throw out the idea, RFC style.

This document specifies the Standard One-Byte Restaurant 
Review Protocol. This edition serves as a draft of 
codifying culinary reviews, without concern for error 
handling, option codes, and the security, precedence, 
compartments, and handling restriction features of the 
review protocol.

In many standards track documents several words are used 
to signify the requirements in the specification. These 
words are often capitalized.  This document defines these 
words as they should be interpreted in IETF documents.  
Authors who follow these guidelines should incorporate 
this phrase near the beginning of their document:

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", 
"SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED",  
"MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be 
interpreted as described in RFC 2119.

Note that the force of these words is modified by the 
requirement level of the document in which they are used.

1. MUST   This word, or the terms "REQUIRED" or "SHALL", 
   mean that thedefinition is an absolute requirement of 
   the specification.

2. MUST NOT   This phrase, or the phrase "SHALL NOT", 
   mean that the definition is an absolute prohibition of 
   the specification.

3. SHOULD   This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", 
   mean that there may exist valid reasons in particular 
   circumstances to ignore a particular item, but the full 
   implications must be understood and carefully weighed 
   before choosing a different course.

4. SHOULD NOT   This phrase, or the phrase "NOT 
   RECOMMENDED" mean that there may exist valid reasons in 
   particular circumstances when the particular behavior is 
   acceptable or even useful, but the full implications 
   should be understood and the case carefully weighed 
   before implementing any behavior described with this 
   label.

--

The one-byte restaurant review protocol is intended to 
give a standardized meaning to culinary reviews, 
preserving both common definitions of criteria, as well as 
offering a reader as much information as possible in the 
most efficient manner.

While this specification does offer some subjectivity in 
the thresholds of certain ranges, the expressed goal is to 
define a central format that can be interpreted by a range of 
products from diverse vendors.

--

Format:

The restaurant review protocol uses a data structure in the 
form of a single byte, with the bit positions indicating 
various features as shown below

  0123 45 67
  ^^^^ ^  ^
  |||| |  |
  |||| |  \- Cost: 11: Everybody's got two mortgages these 
  |||| |               days.
  |||| |           10: One good meal is worth a week of 
  |||| |               ramen.
  |||| |           01: One good meal is worth a dinner of 
  |||| |               grilled cheese sandwiches
  |||| |           00: Woohoo! Cheaper than the unlabeled 
  |||| |               canned food at the megalomart!
  |||| \- Quality: 11: Better than sex.
  ||||             10: Better than Ezra.
  ||||             01: Better than dirt.
  ||||             00: Better than nothing.
  |||\- Formality: 1: Dress up
  |||              0: At least wear something.
  ||\--- Take-out: 1: It's an option.
  ||               0: You go now.
  |\- Cleanliness: 1: What you'd hope for.
  |                0: Alert the CDC.
  \- Availability: 1: There's a good chance you can get 
                      what you search for.
                   0: Plan for it. They might only be open 
                      five minutes a year.
--
Example:
Many 1-byte restaurant review compatible applications may 
use the hexadecimal equivalent to the binary, so a common 
occurrence would be a review such as "7e" or, "01111110", 
which would translate to "rarely open, clean, take-out is 
available, wear the nice threads, best food you'll ever 
have, non-bankruptcy expensive"