You're correct in thinking that the behavior you want is a feature of the planned inline parser, not the current one.
Currently, Asciidoctor uses a flat (regexp-based) inline parser / converter. That means the parent of any inline node is the containing block, as you have observed. In other words, one inline element has no awareness of another inline element.
This is one of the rare cases I'd suggest using a Postprocessor. Once the inline content is converted, it has a proper node structure. You can then use an HTML (or XML) parser to locate nested inline elements and rewrite them. And it will be perfectly accurate.
To process only the "article" content, just start the node with the ID of "content".
Here's how you might go about it:
```ruby
require 'nokogiri'
content = IO.read 'test.html'
html_doc = Nokogiri::HTML::Document.parse content
article_node = (html_doc.xpath '//div[@id="content"]')[0]
(article_node.xpath '//strong/em/..').each do |node|
node.replace node.to_html.gsub('<em>', '</strong><bolditalic>').gsub('</em>', '</bolditalic><strong>')
end
IO.write 'test-output.html', html_doc.to_html
```
Using xpath, you can pretty much dive into any combination of nodes and simply rewrite the elements. And nokogiri allows you to manipulate the document quickly in a lot of different ways.
Cheers,
Locked
