Yep, that's just the way frames work. Let me add my vioce to the FRAMES ARE EVIL call though. The way frames are often used is to simply provide "global" content on the page. For example, it's not uncommon to see a menu in a frame that controls a content frame. The menu frame is generally the same for each frame of content. This made it so that the developer only had to maintain the applications menu in one place without having to modify every page of the app if the menu were to change.
The times they are a changing though. Today we can use applications such as DreamWeaver to build our web pages. In a tool such as DreamWeaver, you can store your repeatable elements (such as menus) as library items which DreamWeaver will include in each page and update as necessary. Applications such as DreamWeaver aside, we can do the same thing in
JSP via includes. Even better than straight JSP includes, there are various libraries available for templating in
Java Web apps. For example,
Struts includes the Tiles templating library which allows us to do most anything that we might have done in frames in the past, particularly as it applies to repeatable elements.
Frames are pretty nasty for application designers to have to use since they make it hard to maintain appl;cation flow control. If you have the option, and since you are using Struts anyway, it might not be a bad idea to look at Tiles as an alternative.