14. The method of claim 13 wherein said message characteristics are selected from the group consisting of byte alignment characteristics, skip count characteristics, repeat count characteristics, tag name characteristics, component rendering characteristics, delimiter characteristics, tag length characteristics, tag data separator characteristics, tag characteristics, rendering characteristics including whether rendering is to be as an element or an attribute, padding character characteristics, sign convention characteristics, and precision characteristics.
13. The method of claim 11 wherein said physical meta-model further includes at least one context-specific characteristics class for overriding said default message characteristics or defining new message characteristics for a message or message component in a particular wire format based on a context of said message or message component.