Just wanted to expand a little about ranges. I believe that it would be great if we can look beyond dates only. Often, when you need to represent progress, you don’t need dates, but instead plain numbers (number of times you need to do some task per each week f.e.), percents or even colors. In all these cases just dates ranges is simply not enough.
So I suggest to have a syntax that can have not only dates, but also other types of input variables.
Following @Erica suggestion I’m linking topic with such suggestion and examples of such uniform syntax.