Empty Template results in erroneous XHR when ngInclude is passed a function

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Plnkr Demo

This is a pretty straightforward issue. When the template cache has an entry for a template set to empty string (""), ng-include of that template by name (e.g. ng-include="foo.html") is smart enough to tell the difference between an empty template and a non-existent one, because it won't attempt to fetch the template with an XHR.

However, if the ngInclude is used in conjunction with an expression that invokes a function (e.g. ng-include="templateFor('footer')"), an empty template will result in an XHR.

This may seem like a minor quibble, but I'm actually experiencing some extremely bizarre downstream behavior in a real application due to this (which utlimately causes Chrome to lock up because it's hitting the digest limit repeatedly).