".NET Standard is a specification that represents a set of APIs that all .NET platforms have to implement. This unifies the .NET platforms and prevents future fragmentation. Think of .NET Standard as POSIX for .NET."

https://github.com/dotnet/standard/blob/master/docs/faq.md

Indeed :-)

Here is how to think about this:

* .NET Standard is a specification of APIs.

* ECMA 335 is the specification of the .NET runtime aspects (i.e. what the metadata format is, what the semantics are of the intermediate language and so on).

* ECMA 334 is the C# language specification.

So there are really multiple specs that would make up a ".NET spec". We simply settled on .NET Standard because it's shorter than .NET Standard Library and the word standard conveys the spec aspect around it. We could have called it .NET Standard API Set but hey, it's supposed to be a product name, not a multi-word description :-)

Does this help?

I think it is the spec? I don't blame you for the confusion though.

I do think that there is light at the end of the tunnel and that once Microsoft finally works through all this, it will be a lot less confusing. But lord has it been a painful transition. My head is swimming in ".NET <Foo>"s

The ".NET Spec" doesn't have the name ".NET" in it anywhere - .NET has always been the name of Microsoft's implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure spec (https://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ec...).

Now that Microsoft itself (and Mono + Xamarin) has multiple implementations of the CLI, it's spec'd the API surface area that is to be expected across the multiple implementations (since this is explicitly not covered in detail in ECMA335) - hence the name, .NET Standard.