Attached is an Minimal Complete Example.

We, the French, we like to a have a non breakable space before non connected punctuation signs, namely ";" ":" "?" and "!". The babel package, when the french package option is used, provides some way to have these non breakable spaces generated automatically. That is to say, this punctuation signs are made active chatacters.

It seems that tex4ht has some problem with that.

Well, babel has an option to deactivate this function, and the user can still use explicit "~", so this is not a deadly problem. Nevertheless, this is a bug in my opinion.