Quite the contrary, inside the field of computer science it is exactly the correct term used. Practitioners may use different words, but theoreticians describe

Quite the contrary, inside the field of computer science it is exactly the correct term used. Practitioners may use different words, but theoreticians describe protocols as instantiations of a language, whose encoding is defined by syntax. If you work on the formal verification of protocols, for example, as many people developing a spec would be, you would speak in terms of the properties and tradeoffs of various syntax.