French punctuation

I noticed in Assimil that the sentences were punctuated differently and didn't think too much of it.. but as I began to correct other people's work on LiveMocha it became apparent to me that punctuation was rather important. Many people would not capitalise the start of their sentences, or use proper spacing between sentences and I felt that if they were going to be so lazy, sometimes I really couldn't even be bothered to correct their work. It's as if they made no real attempt whatsoever..

Anyhoo... according to the wonderful french.about.com site, French does have slightly different punctuation to English.

I already knew about the decimal point thing, where a full stop/period would not be used and a comma would be used instead. eg - 1.5kg of tomatoes = 1,5 kg de tomates.

The main differences that became obvious to me was that there is a space before a colon (:), a semi-colon (;), an exclamation mark (!) and a question mark (?). Also that the quotation marks (" ") are not used, but the 'guillemets' instead. ( « » )

More explained here and how to type them in HTML.