I considered that option, but decided against it. The reason was that, no matter what size you made the transparent icon, the size of the icon is defined in the image tag, so it gets stretched to full icon size. Well, you might say that doesn't matter, since it's transparent. True, but you do see an empty space. With the way I did it, if there is no icon, the text aligns to the edge of the table cell, rather than to the edge of an empty space. In my opinion, it just looks better.

But I'm still looking for help with the include global.php statement!