Design the Help System with Global Functionality | Developing International Software

If your UA content ships as a Help system, remember that the Help system is software. Help systems often use scripting to add features to the Help topic, such as demoted and expanded lists, shortcut links that start applications, and so on. The scripting has to function independently of the locale that is selected. Make all of the templates used to create your documentation "core" and global from the beginning. For example, make sure that the following elements are in the template that you use as the basis for authoring your content:

The directionality attribute, which can be changed to create a right-to-left document; (<HTML DIR=RTL>)
Explicit definition of the character set-for example, charset=attribute, which is used in the HEAD portion of the HTML document and tells the browser how the text in the document has been encoded

If you are authoring Extensible Markup Language (XML) content, follow the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) guidelines on XML at http://www.w3.org.