Examples from here:
No periods for abbreviated US?
No period for abbreviated Mr?
This is the apparent style of the BBC and is consistent in every article. I’ve never seen, or noticed I guess, this before and wonder why this (incorrect?) style is common.
I’ve acted as a proofreader for a British amateur author and he told me that leaving off periods in abbreviations is standard over there. The article is somewhat lacking, but wikipedia confirms it.
*** Ponder
It’s the normal (and correct) style for the UK, followed by all major book publishers, periodicals and schools. The British have been quietly removing periods from most abbreviations for decades now. I believe they may be stockpiling them. For what purpose, I do not know, but our American prodigality with punctuation may soon put us at some unfortunate disadvantage. I suggest cutting periods out of old magazines and newspapers and saving them, just to be safe.
I believe the convention is that initialisms (US, EU, NHS) and abbreviations formed from the first and last letters of a word (Mr, Dr) don’t have periods, but abbreviations formed from the first letters of a word (Prof., Rev., Ave.) do. I’m not sure about abbreviations that don’t fit either criterion (Blvd[.], Mrs[.], e[.]g[.]).
Ignorance fought.
Cheers
And so generally all confusing punctuation is to be removed from the Queen’s English at some point, I predict.
You mean Queens English, surely!
Or am I jumping the gun?
English. English of the Queen. Is this not then the Queen’s English?
Maybe the BBC is pregnant?
Um . . . did you READ the link?
I always worry about that with missed periods.
Americans too, just not at an equal pace. Things like “U.C.” (University of California) are now “UC.” Washington D.C. is often “DC.”
There are two patterns in the States. One pattern is that when an abbreviation of something becomes very commonly used, such as “D.C.”, style guides eventually say, "Okay, you can just write “DC.”
The other pattern is when an abbreviation can be pronounced as though it were a word. Nobody writes “N.A.S.A.,” because everyone can pronounce it as “Nasa.” Same with “NAFTA.”
The period is omitted when it is a contraction in which the last letter is the same as the last letter of the full word, not just when it is exactly the first and last letters of a word. Hence Mrs (Mistress) is a contraction and does not take a period. Aside from that, it would be too confusing to use Mrs. with a period but Mr and Ms without. And for similar reasons of consistency, it is often “Prof” even though it is not a contraction.
We don’t really use Blvd in our street names, but it is a contraction and hence I would not expect a period. A search of the BBC site for “Hollywood Blvd” supports that.
e.g. has periods.
I’ve got here a 1942 letter from “Lt.-Colonel H. P. Hunter, C.B.E., D.L.” [letterhead], which to me seems to be a bit over the top in the punctuation department.
With so many people adapting their typing style to the internet, I think periods will continue to disappear.
There’s no one single set of rules, and the gradual shift is towards ommission - but here’s one newspaper’s style guide’s advice:
Elsewhere it specifies ‘eg’ and ‘Mrs’, but no mention of ‘Boulevard’, and because of its rarity in Britain I’d generally expect it to be written out in full.
The distinction made in the same guide is between those which are spelt out as individual letters, which are all-caps, and those pronounced are words, which are capitalised then lower case. Hence ‘HIV/Aids’.
That would be Mother S.
Well, the National Aeronautics and Space Agency doesn’t do it that way, and no one in the US ever writes about the North American Free Trade Association by using “Nafta.”
Any newspaper can choose its own particular style, and US papers almost always write “AIDS.”
I wasn’t talking about the US, I was talking about British media, in the context of the OP. (As such, it’s worth noting that the Times and Telegraph, bastions of Proper English, have ‘Nafta’ and ‘Nasa’ in their style guides. 
)
Mister President, we must not allow a punctuation gap!
As has been said, many British writing guides have made a distinction between a “contraction”, in which the last letter remains the same, and an “abbreviation”, in which the last letter is among those removed. No period is put at the end of a contraction.
Ed