[oh_sigh]

Why does the BBC use "Nasa" instead of "NASA"?

[IanCal]

>Where you would normally say the abbreviation as a string of letters - an initialism - use all capitals with no full stops or spaces (eg FA, UNHCR, NUT). However, our style is to use lower case with an initial cap for acronyms, where you would normally pronounce the set of letters as a word (eg Aids, Farc, Eta, Nafta, Nasa, Opec, Apec).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/journalism/article/art201307021...

[snug]

To piggy back off this, different news outlets have their own set of rules. For example, CNET (I think) wouldn't use upper case past 4 characters Example: NASA, Nascar

[ghaff]

Style guides also tend to ignore funky punctuation, etc. in company names. For example, it was pretty standard to drop the ! in Yahoo!. There is certainly an argument for respecting the wishes of a name's owner but it's also understandable to do otherwise for readability.

In this particular case, there are also a lot of acronyms that have entered such common usage (like radar) that capitalizing them would seem odd. And too many capped acronyms, Studly Caps, hyphenations etc. hurt readability after a while.

[evincarofautumn]

I always like when it’s written “Yahoo!” because I read it with an alveolar click, as /jahu!/. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alveolar_clicks>

[userbinator]

It somewhat amuses me to think that "forced CamelCasing of abbreviations" is a thing outside of code. I wonder where it began.

(Personally, I find it irritating and more annoying to read, both in prose and in code.)

[ape4]

Using the capitalization the organization prefers seems like the best way to me. I'm sure they do it for people. The would not change the capitation of a Dutch last name for example.