Right. Good for them for having a unique style, but I don't know why anyone else would decide to format their text like this. Same thing with the recent "black"/"Black" decision by NYTimes.
Acronyms—which according to the N.Y.T is any initialism which is pronounceable as a word instead of by its individual letters—are styled in all capitals when they are four letters or fewer. Longer acronyms are styled in titlecase.
Meanwhile, initialisms retain periods between the capital letters. (I find this to be terribly ugly since it messes up kerning.)
So with this combination of rules we get this ridiculous result: N.F.L., NATO, and Nafta.
They used to write "Nascar", but it seems they've changed their mind on that:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/insider/now-it-is-officia...
https://www.nytimes.com/topic/organization/national-associat...
I wonder if anyone can figure out why the N.Y.T. styles broadcast networks as acronyms? ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC.
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/20/magazine/on-language-ling...
And they wrote it S.O.S. Which is patently wrong.
SOS is not sent in Morse like this, as if it were three separate letters:
dit dit dit (pause) dah dah dah (pause) dit dit dit
(The letter "S" is "dit dit dit" and the letter "O" is "dah dah dah".)
It's sent all at once without pauses between the letters, because it is not the three separate letters at all. SOS is a "prosign", sent like this:
dit dit dit dah dah dah dit dit dit
To help indicate this, SOS is customarily typeset with an overbar connecting the letters, like this:
___
SOS
It's not an initialism, not three separate letters, and definitely not S.O.S.
It replaced the earlier CQD. The Titanic transmitted both because SOS had only recently been adopted.
Also, I might be wrong, but I don't think people read most words by scanning letter by letter and forming a belief as to what the word says. I personally have never misread cooperate as cooper, as far as I can recall.
These are all minor trade-offs (or is it tradeoffs?) of course; it's not a cut-and-dry (but hopefully not cutanddry) argument as to what to do in any individual case.
Co-worker vs cow orker, etc.