> Modern style guides recommend no space before them and one space after.
And that's really interesting about French. Personally I think a colon surrounded by spaces looks funny, but then again, I've never learned a language where that wasn't the correct way.
edit: my French girlfriend says French puts spaces on both sides of all punctuation except commas and periods. Like this !
Funny story, I'm a native English speaker but I've been studying French for the past few years. I now constantly and subconsciously add spaces before punctuation like French grammar.
To be precise, the space before punctuation is of course non-breaking, and it is a narrow no-break space (i.e., thinner than a usual space) in careful typography (e.g., LaTeX with "\usepackage[francais]{babel}" does it).
(Another fun pedantic remark: French typography rules require that you apply the rules of a foreign language whenever you quote text in that language, so that the English rules should be respected for English quotations within a French text.)
And I agree with akx -- being French, I've seen my share of French people writing in English with the French rules, and I always thought that it could be used as an indicator by a careful reader.
(As an example, there used to be an ads campaign in the Parisian subway some years ago which advertised "I speak Wall Street English !" or something or the kind. As this was for an English class, I always found it funny that they couldn't get their English typography right.)
