Markwhen is a journal language

Ever since I started working on markwhen, I've had a bit of a hard time describing what markwhen is.

• "It's a timeline creator"

• "Make gantt charts using plain text"

• "It's like markdown but for timelines"

I started using the markdown comparison a lot. Like markdown, markwhen is plain-text-y but can be transformed into something more visually meaningful.

This past weekend I kind of had an epiphany about what markwhen is - it's a journal language. And by that I mean it is a collection of dated entries. That's it! But being able to simply say what it is that I'm working on, what markwhen actually *is*, unjams a lot of my thought processes about what I'm doing.

Markwhen started as a timeline visualization app, and don't get me wrong, that's still what it's best at. But there really aren't limits as to what it could be, given this new description of it as a journal language. Because many things are collections of dated entries - journals, diaries, timelines, calendars, blogs, logs, social feeds, etc. etc.

For example, this blog is written in markwhen! Why not, right? A collection of dated entries.