It’s time to break out the funeral dirge for periods in punctuation. For folks who have a sentimental attachment to the various English style books, this break-up is going to be hard.
The demise of the period is directly correlated with the rise of the Google search engine. Google simple ignores them. An excellent article written about the recognition of punctuation by the search engines way back in 2010 (thesearchagents.com (Wayback Machine link)) makes it clear that the user doing the search doesn’t need to include punctuation in their search, nor does the website owner need to include punctuation in their keywords. This is true for separating words with periods.
I’m asked frequently to add periods to abbreviations on websites when clients are convinced I’ve made an error by dropping them. Nope, I’m not skipping periods by mistake, but rather I’m following the accepted web standard of 2014.
The abbreviation that often causes the most concern is “post office box.” The recommended style for print is “P. O. Box.” Alas, the web is different. Because Google ignores the periods, they have disappeared from use causing the abbreviation to become “PO Box”.
Still doubting the end of periods? The US Post Office has adopted the web abbreviation “PO Box” on their website (see above image). When the US government (not necessarily known for their rapid change) has gotten behind the web usage of this abbreviation it’s time to accept this change in English usage.
Fewer periods, less keystrokes… that’s good stuff!
