Revert massive replacement of empty list creation sentences. The use of '[list]' instead of '{}' adds semantics that could be used for performance improvements in the future, such as using a different internal representation. There is already work in this direction, avoiding the generation of the string representation during comparison of empty strings (huge thanks to Stefan Sobernig for the pointer: https://core.tcl.tk/tcl/info/44527c632ed609c2).
feed-parser: Added code to feed_parser::parse_feed so that there is an explicit encoding conversion. This is because of an apparent change in the behavior of ns_httpget in AOLserver 4.0 where the HttpOpenCharset parameter is no longer honored