Force a checkbox to always submit, even when unchecked

Thanks to @Lazarus' idea, also mentioned by @BalusC, you can add an additional control to the form:

<input type="hidden" name="checkbox1" value="off">
<input type="checkbox" name="checkbox1" value="on"> My checkbox

Checkbox and the hidden fields must have the same name. The hidden input is always submitted as a default value. If the checkbox is checked then also it's submitted. So you have a list of 2 values for parameter "checkbox1", that you have to treat at server side.

...maybe a <select> tag would be more handy.

There is a legitimate reason for asking for something like this, although the behaviour envisioned here is not the right way to go about it. There is a problem with the checkbox when used correctly when editing existing data and that's that there is no way to determine whether no value was submitted because the field was not present on the form or because the user cleared all of the values. You can run into this sort of problem any time you include fields conditionally.

One could go to the trouble of maintaining a "view state", of course, but it's much easier to include a hidden "companion field" whenever a checkbox or select with the multiple option (which is also excluded when all selections are cleared) is displayed. The field should have a related but different name (a name from which the actual field name can be extracted). The Lotus Domino server has used fields named %%Surrogate_FieldNameHere for this purpose since (I believe) version 7 for exactly the reason I described here.