Glad to hear you are an enthusiast of standards.

To do what you want, place the code for your menu in a seperate file, e.g., navigation.inc.

In your page template, inside the div that is to contain the navigation, use an include statement to pull in the file containing the navigation code.

You can use as an example, depending on what you have available to you:

<?php include ('navigation.inc'); ?> - PHP method

<!--#include file='navigation.inc'--> - SSI method

Note that with the SSI syntax, it's important not to have a space between the <!-- and the #.