Dr. Rockey, in his interesting paper on the design of vertical stiffeners for shear webs, perpetuates the idea of Timoshenko (Theory of Elastic Stability, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1936) that for stiffener rigidities above a certain value the stiffeners remain straight and the rigid stiffener buckling load is reached. It is my opinion that this is only so when the stiffeners happen to be placed along a straight node of one of the harmonics of the buckling pattern of the unstiffened plate. With unstiffened plates under shear loads, the nodes are not straight and consequently the buckling load will theoretically always increase with increase of stiffener rigidity, i.e. no buckling mode exists such that stiffeners of finite rigidity remain straight. It is suspected that Timoshenko was led to his conclusion by over-estimated buckling loads obtained by energy methods.