The headline for this article: Hips extended to three-bed homes is quite incomprehensible, and quite amusing for those of us not blessed with knowledge of British property regulations.
The BBC seem to have an in-house style of not capitalizing letters in abbreviations (I cannot confirm this since their style guide doesn't seem to be online). The above article would suggest that people's hips were somehow being extended, but instead the article is about the Home Information Pack Scheme - HIPS, and how the scheme is being applied to more property transactions.
The BBC has a history of doing this with abbreviations and acronyms which really ought to be capitalized. We don't write "Usa", we write "USA". We don't write "Vat", we write "VAT". "DVD" not "Dvd". But why, when it comes to government practice to the BBC insist on 'word-izing' them. ASBO becomes 'Asbo'?
You cannot even argue - as some have - that it's the difference between an acronym and an initialism based on pronunciation. VAT is pronounced both as separate letters and like the word "vat". That is capitalised (rightly) even though the BBC should write it as Vat to be consistent with their barmy style. The same is true for CAD, DOM (admittedly, the BBC do not discuss the Document Object Model on their news site too often), DOS, EULA (here the BBC reporter notes that people pronounce it as to rhyme with "fool-ya"!), FIFO, FLAC, GIMP, GUI (often pronounced "gooey"), JPEG ("jaypeg"), LAN, NAT and many more.
The trend in British publishing towards using lower-case for all acronyms except initialisms and other exceptions is barmy. It leads to unreadable copy and we should stop it now. We don't have to get to the situation that the N.Y.T. is in where every single acronym is water-bombed with punctuation (I mean, W.T.F.?), but when you cannot easily distinguish a government procedure for house-selling from a body part in a news headline, you know there is a problem. Upper case letters give important context for the reader, and help them distinguish between words and abbreviations. It's not like there is a shortage of capital letters. The BBC need to find their shift keys.
