Note that if the Alphabetical parameter is set to 'no' then none of the information on this page applies, other than the Pipe Symbol heading below.
AlphaNet handles the alphabetical sorting of menu entries automatically; the order in which you add the 'Entry' parameters to your HTML document, or the number suffixes you assign to each parameter, makes almost no difference at all. At any time you can add more Entries and they'll be alphabetized with the rest.
Entries are alphabetized by their first 10 characters, ignoring spaces and making no distinction between upper and lower case. So "Eastwood" and "east wood" are seen as being identical for purposes of alphabetizing. Characters are sorted by the following prioritization:
^ [see below]
0 - 9
A - Z / a - z
. [dot]
, [comma]
- [dash]
All other characters
So 1998 Movies would appear above 1997 Movies, spellbound would appear above spell-bound, and One. Two would appear above One, two.
Exception To The Rule...
Imagine the following situation: you have the entries Young Americans and Young Americans In Love on your menu. The characters that matter for alphabetizing (the first 10) are identical, so which will appear first on the menu? In fact, the Entry parameter's number suffixes do make a difference: in these cases, the higher number will appear first on the menu. So if these are appearing in the wrong order, just exchange the numbers of the two parameters.
The Pipe Symbol
The pipe symbol (|) is used as a 'delimiter' in the Entry parameter to split the contents of the parameter into three distinct sections. This means that the pipe symbol can never be shown in the menu -- it's regarded as a control character not a display character. Using this character in any other way in the parameter may cause an error and would probably prevent that entry's URL from functioning.
Extra Prioritization
It may be that although you want most entries to be alphabetized, you have links such as Index, Home, Email and Help that you'd like to separate from the rest to make them more noticeable. For this reason, an additional character has been claimed as a control character: the ^ symbol. (Think of it this way: if there were a number before 0 or a letter before A, this would be it.)
Any Entry parameters whose text starts with the ^ character will be moved to the top of the menu. If more than one entry has this first character, they'll be alphabetized among themselves. The ^ character is not displayed. An example:
<param name=Entry3 value="Videos">
<param name=Entry14 value="^Products">
<param name=Entry19 value="^Email">
<param name=Entry26 value="Compact Discs">
<param name=Entry57 value="^Home">
<param name=Entry88 value="Floppy Discs">
<param name=Entry121 value="^Index">
<param name=Entry459 value="^Help">
would appear on the menu as:
Email
Help
Home
Index
Products
Compact Discs
Floppy Discs
Videos
Similarly, if you were determined that the 'Index' link should be right at the top of the menu, prefix it with two ^ symbols, thus giving it a higher prority than anything else (like those companies that pick names like AAAA1, Inc to appear first in yellow pages).