Generating unique page titles/meta for detail pages

Although I have my own solution for this, I always seem to struggle a bit with the best way of generating unique page meta (titles and descriptions) for the detail pages in the List and Detail solutions. I end up with something like this:

<title><?php if(empty($_GET)) {
   perch_pages_title();
}
else
{
    perch_content_custom .... [with unique template]
}
?></title>

and something similar for meta descriptions. I'm sure this isn't very efficient.

I've done some searches in the forum and there are a few solutions but I'm wondering the best way of doing this. I appreciate that every site is different but could this be added to the List and Detail solutions?