trouble having document validate with w3c validator
===

I have a ColdFusion page I'm trying to validate with the [w3c validator][1]. The first few lines are giving me issues (only relevant code shown)

    <cfsetting enablecfoutputonly="YES">
    <cfset editing = 1>
    
    <!--- Makes sure user has logged on --->
    <CFINCLUDE TEMPLATE="checkauth.cfm">
    <cfsetting enablecfoutputonly="NO">
    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
    <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
    <head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
    </head>
    </html>

The validator gives "Unable to Determine Parse Mode!" and "no doctype found". Isn't the doctype declared on line 7 and the parse mode on line 10? Also it has a problem with the ColdFusion comment "invalid comment declaration: found name character outside comment but inside comment declaration" in this situation would it be safe just to make it a HTML comment (with one less dash on each side)?
  [1]: http://validator.w3.org/check