One thing to note in why RIP could have never been successful, aside from originally being closed-source, is while it was vector-based in nature the specification called for a static sized view port of 320x200. Future revisions of the spec could have fixed this but it would have missed the window to be relevant going from BBS to WWW.

SGML was a thing before RIP. We might have skipped from SGML to XML though, and something like `<rip>...</rip>` might have been a thing.