French Spaces

When we were a long-distance couple, I used to find PeeWee's emails exceedingly cute. No capital letters whatsoever and quirky placements of spaces that left me with the impression that he was totally unaccustomed to typing. For example, he would write:

i had great fun hanging out with my friends ,you know them ,at bars tonight. we were so drunk ! you remember jean ?

It was all I could do to suppress all urges to print out the emails and whip out my red pen for correcting his use of spaces around punctuations. I often had the same urge when I got emails from French friends, who, similarly, seemed not to be schooled in this topic.

So imagine the astonishment I felt when Hana came home with a corrected test - she had been tested on writing on keyboards. Her teacher stressed in red that there must be a space before a question mark. I told Hana that this must be wrong. Her standard response to me when I say that these days is "google it, maman"

So I did, and this is what I found.

"Pour les points d'interrogation, d'exclamation et le point-virgule [typographie européenne] : une espace avant et une espace après." - meaning, for question marks, exclamation points and semi-colons, a space before and a space after.

Whoa! Whaddayaknow!? But why???? Do other languagues have different punctuation/space rules too? I know the Spanish put an inverted question mark before the questioning sentence; the French also use commas instead periods for decimals. However I had no idea about the use of spaces; all this time I was attributing that to carelessness or sloppiness. I've been corrected once again!