cgi, reusing html. common problem?

[John M. Gabriele]

I'm putting together a small site using Python and cgi.

(I'm pretty new to this, but I've worked a little with
JSP/servlets/Java before.)

Almost all pages on the site will share some common (and
static) html, however, they'll also have dynamic aspects.
I'm guessing that the common way to build sites like this
is to have every page (which contains active content) be
generated by a cgi script, but also have some text files
hanging around containing incomplete html fragments which
you read and paste-in as-needed (I'm thinking:
header.html.txt, footer.html.txt, and so on).

Is that how it's usually done? If not, what *is* the
usual way of handling this?

Thanks,
---John

-- 
--- if contacting via email, remove zees ---